A Study of Simplification Strategies by Native Speakers of English : Use of Discourse Markers
Seiji Fukazawa · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 1994
Recent research into non-native speakers' communication strategies has revealed some common features in their communicative efforts. On the other hand, native speakers' strategies to make their speeches comprehensible to non-native speakers have not been examined in great details yet. The present study compared the two texts: a letter (the original version) and a transcription of the speech which paraphrased the letter with explanations (the simplified version) and then analyzed the process of native speakers' simplification efforts in a spontaneous speech in terms of the use of discourse markers: micro and macro-discourse markers. At the same time, a quantitative comparison was made such as a mean length of T-unit/sentence and readability. As a result, a simplified version was proved to be not necessarily simple in terms of the syntactic aspect. However, in the discourse level, the simplified speech contained a lot more micro/macro discourse markers than the original text. This seems to suggest that discourse markers play a key role in simplifying a text and the foreign language teachers should realize the significance of discourse markers to make classroom input comprehensible to the learners.