Investigating the Effectiveness of Spoken Discourse Markers in English Language Teaching

The present study reports on a mixed methods classroom research study carried out in Shahed high school in Farsan city, located in Shahrekord, Iran. The current study investigates the effectiveness of two different explicit teaching frameworks, Illustration–Interaction– Induction (III) and Present – Practice – Produce (PPP) used to teach the same spoken discourse markers (DMs) to two different groups of students at the same level of language competency. It was hypothesised that one explicit teaching framework would be more effective than the other in terms of short and longer term acquisition and both would be more effective than no teaching when viewed objectively with test data and subjectively by the students themselves. The hypothesis was tested through the use of a free response speaking test used as a pre-test, an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test of eight weeks. Raw counts of the target DMs and interactive ability, discourse management and global test scores indicated that both experimental groups outperformed the control group in the immediate post-test in terms of the target DMs used. The analysis of the pre- and posttests, using one-way ANOVAs, indicated statistically significant differences between the experimental PPP group and the control group in terms of a higher mean usage of the target DMs in the immediate post-test, whilst the III group‘s score did not indicate a statistically significant difference when compared to the PPP and control groups.

کلیدواژه ها:

Explicit teaching ، Discourse markers ، Spoken discourse markers ، High school students