Development of the use of discourse markers across different fluency levels of CEFR: A learner corpus analysis
Abstract
Fluent L2 English speakers have been shown to be competent users of discourse markers (DMs) but research has so far not focused on the way that the use of DMs develops across different levels of proficiency. The present study aims to illustrate the developmental patterns of well, you know and like as they are represented in the speech of A1-C2 learners of EFL, considering also their immersive experience.
The extended LINDSEI corpus (which has been assessed for proficiency and perceived fluency) containing 15-minute recordings of 183 learners and a parallel native corpus (50 speakers) provided 366,397 tokens which contained 3,520 instances of the analyzed DMs. Their relative frequency at the different levels of proficiency has been compared and it has also been compared with native-speaker frequencies, showing that the frequency of these DMs increases with rising proficiency and perceived fluency levels, and may affect perceived fluency ratings.
C1 and C2 learners' performance is virtually native-like (except in the use of like), and immersive experience closely correlates with DM frequency. It is suggested that the use of DMs as a speech management strategy may be preferable to the use of fillers and pausing, and that this strategy should receive more didactic attention.