The Effect of Discourse Markers on Academic Listening Comprehension: An investigation of Sri Lankan University Students Listening to Lectures in the English-Medium

Vivimarie Medawattegedera

ABSTRACT
Discourse markers are cohesive devices that act as connectives and explicitly signal the structure of a piece of discourse. They are used by the speaker to indicate how what is being said is related to what has already been said. They can be divided into micro markers (e.g. Now, Well, OK), and macro markers (e.g. That brings us to, To begin with) etc. This study is an attempt to explore the relationship between discourse markers and listening comprehension, in a situation where academic lectures are delivered by lecturers who are non-native speakers of English, to students who are also non-native speakers. It focuses on the effect of discourse markers on the academic listening comprehension of a group of undergraduates studying towards the Bachelors in Management Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Open University of Sri Lanka. The study also examines the interaction between the effect of discourse markers on lecture comprehension, and the English language proficiency level of the subjects. Using a short audio-taped lecture on urbanization, and closed and open measures of evaluation to assess comprehension, the study investigates the presence or absence of two types of discourse-markers on comprehension of an academic lecture. The main findings of this investigation suggest that a combination of micro and macro markers, used in a lecture, facilitates greater comprehension than the use of only micro markers, among students of both intermediate and advanced proficiency levels. However, student with an intermediate level of proficiency seem to benefit more from the inclusion of both types of discourse markers. Further the inclusion of both types of markers facilitates better performance in the task of summarizing lecture information. Some recommendations are made for language teachers with regard to teaching English for Academic Purposes as well as for teacher-trainers.
INTRODUCTION

"I think I'll learn more from listening. Anything I would say I already know."

(Anonymous student explaining why she did not wish to participate in a discussion, quoted in Christian Science Monitor)

The spread of English as the international language and lingua franca of the academic world has been followed by large numbers of people studying at university level through the medium of English as a foreign or a second language. This happens whether one is studying in one's own country or if one travels to a country where English is spoken as a first language. As Johns, (1981) Richards, (1983) and Benson (1989) point out, a major part of university study is based on the lecture. Therefore, listening to lectures in English is an experience that almost all university students the world over would face, at undergraduate or at post graduate level. Lecturing is a widely accepted practice in Sri Lankan institutions of higher learning, as well.

In Sri Lanka, although post-independence nationalism inspired a Sinhala-Only Act of Parliament in the late fifties, and Sinhalese and Tamil have been listed as official languages in the Sri Lankan Constitution since the early sixties, and have been the only media of instruction in schools, English has remained the de facto official language of the country, gaining importance in the business and academic sectors of the country. Therefore, English has been used as a medium of instruction at university level, especially in the Faculties of Science and Technology, Engineering, Medicine, and Management Studies. Not only do students have to sometimes listen to lectures in the English medium, but a large proportion of the text books and reference material found in university libraries too, are in English, as is information in scholarly journals and on the Internet. However, having learnt English only as a subject, often with lack of motivation, this sudden transition to English as a major medium of instruction in their academic careers often turns out to be difficult and problematic.

Although most of these students' problems derive from linguistic discoursal or cultural sources, at least part of the difficulty is the nature of the lecture format itself. As Bilbow (1989) points out, "unlike face to face communication [i.e. conversation] where the rate of delivery is governed by conversational rules which encourage comprehension, a lecture is unique in that it consists of a steady flow of information delivered at a rate which may be only marginally influenced by a sensitivity to the problems faced by the speaker's audience". He points out a further difficulty: "within the lecture's formal context, no student feels at liberty to stop the speaker to ask for clarification" (1989:85). This would be especially relevant to the context of a typical Sri Lankan classroom, where teachers are accorded great "respect" and are not likely to be interrupted while speaking.

In order to reduce the effects of this problem, many service/support programmes and courses have been set up at all Sri Lankan universities. However, these programmes, popularly known as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses, currently being conducted in many of the universities in Sri Lanka, focus mainly on reading skills and writing skills; little attention has been given to the skills needed for listening to lectures in the English medium.

With greater numbers entering English medium institutions of higher education around the world, the provision of appropriate English language training as a preparation for academic study has become increasingly important. This growing demand for and existence of EAP courses has led to the need for research into the processes underlying academic performance in a second language context such as Sri Lanka. Such research could provide input to teacher training as well as to the development of appropriate curriculum and instructional materials. The literature on EAP related to listening comprehension, has concentrated on the analysis of the various strategies for listening and for note-taking considered to be needed by the non-native speaker who has to be able to follow lectures or seminars in English (Murphy and Candlin 1979, cited in Chaudron and Richards 1986; Chaudron, Loschky and Cook, 1994). Little research with regard to academic listening has been conducted in relation to English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in the Sri Lankan context, or in relation to learners whose first language is Sinhalese or Tamil.

Subject lecturers who deliver English-medium lectures to non-native speaker students often modify their lectures in order to facilitate comprehension. Flowerdew (1994), describes two ways to help non-native speakers understand lectures in a second language. One is to improve their knowledge skills in the target language until the comprehension process is no longer a problem. The other is "somehow to modify the form of the lectures to vary the input so as to make them easier to comprehend" (1994:20). This is often done intuitively, and takes many forms: it is possible to deliver the lecture at a slower pace, to increase the number of pauses, to simplify the syntax or grammar, repeat certain words and phrases. It is also possible to structure the information in a lecture in a particular way so that it will be made more comprehensible to the listener. This study investigates the effects of such structuring by means of signalling devices such as discourse markers. Discourse markers are words or phrases that "frame" segments of talk and give a pattern to discourse. For example, the word "OK", "Well" "next", "to begin with", "Finally", "to summarise", "In conclusion", "What we will now consider" etc. not only give direction to the lecture and also serve as fillers, giving students time to process what they have just heard.

Review of the Literature

In view of the didactic focus of lectures, the structuring and organisation of information within a lecture has been assumed to be an essential aspect of its comprehensibility (Chaudron and Richards, 1986); and now there is widespread recognition that ESL learners have potential problems in following the structure of academic lectures. (Powers, 1986, Tudor and Tuffs, 1991, Flowerdew and Miller, 1992). For example, Tudor and Tuffs' (1991) study shows that expectations and/or knowledge regarding the macro discourse organisation of a lecture will influence a second language (L2) listener's comprehension.

Yuan, (1982, cited in Bilbow, 1989) also found, through research carried out with Chinese students at the University of California in Los Angeles, that a lack of discourse awareness was highly detrimental to the lecture comprehension process: "in general, the subjects were rather weak at paying attention to the sequence of the lecture because of their neglect of the logical connectors of sequence and their lack of recognition of transition from one main idea to another."

The recognition of these problems has generated a growth in research on the comprehension of spoken connected discourse (Carroll, 1986).

Studies related to first language (L1) listeners:

According to existing research, the presence of more global discourse markers and phrases which signal a change in topic or point of emphasis appears to aid recall in lectures.
Kintsch and Yarbrough's (1982) experiments related to the role of rhetorical structure in text comprehension with native speaker (L1) readers indicate that "good" structuring of a text better facilitates comprehension and recall. 1 Much of the research into reading comprehension is considered to be relevant to listening comprehension (e.g. Jensen and Hansen, 1995; Rost, 1990). Subjects were better able to answer topic and main idea questions for texts that were clearly organised according to a familiar rhetorical structure than for texts with identical content but without such an organisation. Their findings further indicate that the rhetorical cues and canonical ordering that distinguished the "good" forms of the texts from the "bad" forms, facilitate the processing of general propositions (macro-processes) in comprehension. Research on the comprehension of spoken connected discourse by first language (L1) listeners indicates that listening comprehension depends less on the meanings of the individual sentences contained in the discourse than on their apparent interrelatedness and their arrangement (or structure). For example, Chaudron, Loschky and Cook, (1994) recognise that ultimately "learners' comprehension of lecture content however well it is processed by the learner and encoded in notes, will be influenced by the clarity of structure and presentation of the lecture" (1994:89). Allison and Tauroza (1995), investigated whether L1 English listeners experienced similar problems to those of L2 listeners when they encounter unanticipated discourse patterns, and concluded that the difficulties of the L2 subjects were also found among the L1 subjects. This indicates that a discourse organisation patterns have an effect on lecture comprehension, even in English as a Native Language (L1) contexts.
Studies Related to English as Second Language (L2) Listeners

In an investigation of how different categories of discourse markers affect the degree to which foreign students understand university lectures, Chaudron and Richards (1986) concentrated primarily on lectures in the reading style. They divided the markers into two types: macro-markers and micro-markers. Macro markers are "higher order discourse markers signalling major transitions and emphasis in lectures; [e.g.] What I'm going to talk about today is something you probably know something about already, The problem here was that;, Another interesting development was; And that's all we'll talk about today", while micro-markers are "lower order markers of segmentation and inter-sentential connections;[e.g.] markers signalling segmentation (well, ok), time (at that time, after this), cause (so, then), contrast (but, on the other hand)". Their experiment divided 71 subjects, university undergraduates, into four groups: One listened to the "baseline" version of the lecture on the Expansion of the United States, another group listened to the "Micro version", another to a "macro version" and the fourth group listened to a version of the lecture which was a combination of the micro and macro versions. 2 It did not include any special signals of discourse organisation or linking between sentences, other than what was absolutely necessary to convey the meaning of the lecture (Chaudron and Richards, 1986:117) 3 Various markers of intersentential relations, framing segments and pause fillers were inserted [to the baseline version] (Chaudron and Richards, ibid.). 4 containing signals and metastatements about the major propositions within the lecture, or the important transition points in the lecture (Chaudron and Richards, ibid.). Chaudron and Richards (1986) found that although macro-markers on their own had a positive effect on recall when they were added to a text, there was no significant effect for micro markers. Further they found that the lecture version with both micro and macro discourse markers did not facilitate comprehension significantly, or as well as they had hypothesised. They suggest that the use of both micro and macro markers in a listening text may distracted from understanding propositions.

DeCarrico and Nattinger (1988) built on the research by Chaudron and Richards, and investigated lectures in a variety of disciplines, delivered in different lecturing styles. They did not study the effects of discourse markers on comprehension, but instead examined the 'lexical phrases' – "chunks of language of varying length, phrases like as it were, that goes without saying, on the other hand, as X would have us believe and so on" – that occur in several academic lectures representing different disciplines. They bemoan the fact that the few ESL text writers who have recognised the extent of ESL learners' problems in comprehending academic lectures, only suggest "principally a preview of key words, main ideas and outline forms as a solution;or provide practice in recognising common discourse markers" (ibid.:91). They reiterate that L2 learner's problem "goes far beyond that" and propose a lexical phrase approach to resolve it. They confined their study to what Chaudron and Richards (1986) called macro-markers.

Carrico and Nattinger (1998) preferred to call macro markers "macro organisers" because they wanted to stress "the angle of the listener's perception of lecture organisation and to stress their importance in helping students mentally organise the lecture as it goes along". While Chaudron and Richards' study only considered a lecture in the "reading style", DeCarrico and Nattinger (ibid.) recorded "natural lectures on a variety of topics" and set out to find out how many and what type of macro markers actually occur, and to categorise them.
