Meta Utilization of Discourse Markers in a Foreign Language Classroom: A Classroom Discourse Analysis of English Medium Instruction

Abstract

This study aims to capture an English teacher's strategic usage of language to teach English through English, when the teacher has the same native language (Japanese) as his students. Focusing on the code-switching (CS) strategy that is used to shift between the different communication frames of native language (we code) and target language (they code), this study explores how the teacher accomplishes frame shifting through code-switching and maintains the English they-code frame. Using Basic Transcription System for Japanese (BTSJ) (Usami, 2007), classroom discourse analysis of six hours of recordings of English lessons in a public junior high school was carried out and the following characteristics were revealed: 1) Over 60% of the code-switching utterance sentences from mother tongue to English were produced with the discourse marker ‘okay’, 2) 88% of the ‘okays’ were used as framing markers. These results imply that the discourse marker ‘okay’ was being used with a procedural function by the teacher to enable students to interpret frame shifting in lessons. In conclusion, I suggest that meta-utilization of discourse markers can be utilized by English teachers to teach English through the medium of English.