Language Teaching Research Quarterly

Sankoff et al. (1997) indicated in their research on discourse markers (DMs) used by anglophones in Montreal that the mastery of DMs is a good indicator of the non-native speakers’ integration into the linguistic community. As DMs, especially the informal ones, are not taught explicitly in language classes, their acquisition could only be fulfilled by extracurricular contact with native speakers. Despite fruitful works done on DMs in both native and non-native speech, to our knowledge, most of them deal with only one or several DMs at a time without providing a comparable complete list of frequency of DMs in non-native speech. In this article, by exploring the data from 29 semi-guided sociolinguistic interviews conducted in English with non-native speakers in the US, we established a list of frequency of 72 DMs employed by Chinese L1 speakers learning English. By conducting statistical tests, we examined the impact of some extralinguistic factors relevant to non-native speakers in their use of DMs. Our results showed that gender and social network are the two most influential factors for informal DMs, while the age factor seems to be the weakest for all DMs.