Spoken Interaction and Discourse Markers in a Corpus of Learner English

This study is based on a corpus of spoken learner English, namely the Italian component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI). The corpus consists of interviews carried out by English teachers with Italian students learning English as a foreign language. The analysis is focused on the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the teacher-student interviews. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of data, the DMs used by teachers (native speakers of English) and students (Italian learners of English) are first identified and then discussed in relation to their pragmatic functions both in oral interaction and in the organization of discourse. The approach adopted is ‘corpus-based’, since the analysis proceeds from an inventory of DMs selected from the literature and then examines their frequency and function in the corpus.