An analysis of the use of discourse markers in an online course

• Ano de defesa: 2023
• Autor(a) principal: Cezar, Leticia Mello
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Escola de Humanidades; Brasil; PUCRS; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras
• Palavras-chave em Português: Discourse Markers; Corpus Linguistics; Corpus Pragmatics; Conversation Analysis; Online Course; Marcadores Discursivos; Linguística de Corpus; Pragmática de Corpus; Análise da Conversa; Curso Online; LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LETRAS
• Link de acesso: https://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/10838

Linguists have extensively studied the use and function of discourse markers (DMs). The present research focuses on the use of DMs in a virtual classroom from an EMI extension course classroom. The investigation of the oral production of online classes at a pragmatic level is justified due to the importance of pragmatic aspects in environments of intercultural communication. For that, it is necessary to question whether DMs are more common to organize discourse or express intersubjective functions. In addition, do some of the DMs observed in the corpus classify outside of the functional categories described in the theoretical background? That way, the main objective is to analyze the spontaneous oral production of the online course in regard to the use and function of DMs. The study is characterized as a qualitative and exploratory research with a longitudinal approach based on non-participant observation. The methodology is grounded on the concepts of conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, and corpus pragmatics. The data is collected from the virtual meetings recordings conducted through a video conferencing platform. The corpus was transcribed through the software CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis). The results show that in some cases DMs were employed with a different function than the ones described in the literature or even with a weaker meaning when inside of sequences of DMs. Most of the observed DMs performed the function of organizing the discourse. At the end of the study, the entirety of the corpus was analyzed and further discussed in terms of the use and function of DMs in the context of online ESL classes. The discussion was established from both a theoretical and pedagogical standpoint. Future research could focus on the analysis of specific DMs in the context of L2 classrooms and on the explicit teaching of DMs to ESL learners