Los marcadores discursivos : oral vs. escrito : análisis comparativo del uso de marcadores discursivos en narrativas orales y escritas por aprendices francófonos e implicaciones didácticas

Details

Supervisors

De Cock, Barbara

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale, à finalité didactique

Abstract

enSecond language acquisition has raised the interest of many researchers, but there are many aspects still to be explored. One of them is the discourse organization and especially, discourse markers. Using discourse markers shows that the speaker or the writer is fluent in the target language, however, the acquisition of discourse makers causes difficulties for learners. This master thesis investigates the use of discourse markers by intermediate (B2) and advanced (C1) learners of Spanish in unplanned oral and written narratives. To achieve this aim, a comparison was drawn between two corpora: a corpus of written and a corpus of oral narratives of French learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Discourse markers were identified and classified following the functional approach adopted by Galiana, Gras y Rosado (2019) who categorize markers in three macro-functions: propositional, structural and modal. Findings indicate that French learners of Spanish tend to overuse propositional markers in both oral and written narratives. However, structural and modal markers seem to be problematic for learners, especially for intermediate learners of Spanish. To compensate for the lack of discourse markers, they tend to resort to other strategies such as filled pauses, code-switching or paraverbal communication. The results also indicate that teaching has an impact on the use of DMs and therefore, discourse markers should be taught explicitly. From those results, a sequence was designed to help teachers to teach and students to understand and acquire discourse markers in oral narratives.