Author: Jessica Erin Quinn

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13:

Discourse markers, words generally thought to have no meaning, have been shown to contribute to discourse in a number of ways. Words like 'well', 'right', 'ok', 'so', and 'oh' convey information about the structure, meaning, and interpersonal aspects of the discourse in which they occur. Recent studies have explored a variety of discourse markers in a number of settings, but university classrooms have been largely overlooked. Discourse markers have been classified in a number of different ways; the categories differ depending on what is taken to be a discourse marker and which uses are considered more important: textual, structural, or interpersonal. Further, discourse features change depending on the type of discourse and the roles of the speakers involved. Studies of specific discourse features in university classrooms have not observed how the differences in classes' levels, interaction, and content affect those features. Therefore, exploring how professors use discourse markers in university classes and how their use changes in diverse settings can contribute to our understanding of both university discourse and discourse markers themselves. This study examines how university instructors use 'ok', 'so', and 'ok so' to indicate both the structure of the lesson and their role in the classroom. Recordings of three instructors teaching four different classes formed the corpus for analysis so that differences between level, interactivity, and content of the classes and how these factors affect discourse marker use could be examined in greater detail. In three undergraduate sessions and two graduate sessions, with interactivity ranging from ninety-eight percent professor talk to only fifty-nine percent, and content ranging from lecture delivered as instructor monologue, to active discussion sessions, to exam review, the diverse corpus of over thirty-six thousand words contains four hundred and three uses of 'ok', 'so', and 'ok so'. The results show that instructors use 'ok' and 'so' differently depending on the interactivity and content of the classes. In virtue of their functions within classroom interaction, 'ok' is more likely to be used in more interactive classes as a marker of interaction, while 'so' is used in more lecture-style classes as a marker of structure. Results were also found for 'ok so', which combines the popular functions of 'ok' and 'so', but are much less robust and require further study.