Conference description

Often perceived as redundant "filler words", the role of discourse markers has been downplayed in foreign language teaching for a long time, down to banishing them from the curriculum altogether. While the importance of these linguistic elements is only now slowly being acknowledged in foreign language teaching, it has already been subject of a considerable number of studies in the field of second language acquisition and foreign language learning over the last 20 years. Reasons for this heightened interest are, for one part, progress made in the linguistic description and lexicographical compilation of discourse markers, and secondly, the focus on oral communication skills in foreign language education. Discourse markers are considered an important prerequisite for the acquisition of communicative competence. They are difficult to forgo when it comes to starting, maintaining and ending conversations in the foreign language, to take and transfer the turn, to introduce and conclude a topic or to ensure mutual understanding. Their appropriate use facilitates a higher level of speaking fluency, while their complete absence has a confusing effect and gives the impression of 'clumsy' and 'unskilful' speech. The fact that discourse markers are indispensible from the pragmatic point of view is contrasted by the difficulty of describing them and conveying their correct application. René Métrich considers them some of the "trickiest elements of a foreign language", as the challenge for the students to understand them is complicated by the formal indeterminacy and semantic reduction of discourse markers as well as by their functional polyvalence. Studies on the use of discourse markers in foreign languages have scrutinized the development of the repertoire across different levels of proficiency, they have described the functional aspects of L2 usage of discourse markers and analyzed them in relation to non- and paraverbal means in communication. Comparisons were drawn to native language use, the impact of transfer and other processes of the interlanguage were explored and the influence of discourse markers on fluency examined.

This research is usually based on relatively small corpora of learners’ utterances either recorded in rigorously controlled experimental settings where the use of the discourse markers is prompted by specific stimuli or by clearly defined tasks such as map tasks, or in more or less free or simulated interactions between learners or learners and native speakers (interviews, role plays). The observation of learner interaction especially is of great interest for the understanding of how the use of foreign language discourse markers evolves, because it provides insight about how they are applied by the learners, what purposes they fulfil in discussions, how the repertoire of forms and functions relate to each other, or in which way the absence of discourse markers is compensated by other (verbal, para- or non-verbal) means if at all. However, the study of learner interaction brings with it a string of methodological problems that are to be approached in the context of this meeting. They pertain to different parts of the entire research process from the design of the study to the collection, processing and analysis of the data up to the final publication, and address i.a. following aspects:

• the fundamental tension between the need for contextual microanalysis of the use of discourse markers and the need for stable research parameters that allow for a comparison between different speaker groups or survey period
• possibilities and limits of qualitative and quantitative research methods, methodological compatibility and/or complementarity of interdisciplinary approaches
• the importance of non- and paraverbal features for the study of discourse marker use in foreign languages, methods of their notation and analysis
• criteria for ensuring the comparability of data in transversal or longitudinal studies (selection of test persons, competency assessment, survey instruments, design of the survey situation etc.)
• study designs to assess the influence of L1 on the use of foreign language discourse markers (regarding transfer processes)
• methods of determining the relation between the use of discourse markers and communicative competence (e.g. via fluency assessments, acceptability tests, analytical frameworks in language surveys etc.)