Teacher's Discourse Analysis of Yale University's Culture Open Courses － A Corpus-based Study

I。 Introduction

1。1 The Background of the Present Study

     As one of the great achievements in the development of linguistics in last century, corpus linguistics attracts numerous linguists and language researchers to use or establish corpus to study and analyze all fields of linguistic data。 After analyzing the linguistic data, researchers can obtain different linguistic phenomena and offer an explanation according to the research results, which may avoid personal subjective understanding。 In addition, the research results of qualitative method combined with quantitative method are more objective and convincing。论文网

In recent years, the interaction of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis has become one of the research focuses at home and abroad。 A great many researches on corpus-based discourse analysis have been also accomplished。 For example, Corpus linguistics beyond the world: Corpus Research from Phrase to Discourse (2007) was published after the conference of the Fifth North American Symposium (2004) on Corpus Linguistics held by American Association for Applied Corpus Linguistics (AAACL), which presented a view on the extension of corpus studies to discourse fields。 In the past decade, the number of studies of corpus-based discourse analysis has increased significantly。 The corpus-based discourse analysis has become a kind of trend in the new era。

    Influenced by foreign discourse analysis, contemporary discourse analysis in our country began in the 1980s。 However, domestic discourse analysis not only developed relatively late, but lacked in research variety。 Chinese researchers often use the traditional English classroom discourse in their study of second language acquisition。 Therefore, it is difficult for researchers to obtain accurate and valuable research results。 Thus, this paper chooses a most popular and  native English open course: Yale University’s European Civilization with John Merriman to do a corpus-based discourse analysis。 With abundant and authentic linguistic data of open course, some valuable results can be found in this study by using the corpus approaches and techniques。

1。2 Research Purpose

Of this paper, with the help of corpus analytical software AntConc3。4。3w, the main aim is to find three core features of cohesion and coherence, contextual features and interaction in the classroom discourse of Yale University’s European Civilization with John Merriman。 In order to achieve the expected results, the observation of classroom discourse will be made in the following aspects:

1)The frequency and variety of the small words;

2)The clusters of high-frequency words form the corpus;

3)The coverage and frequency of discourse management chunks。 

    A corpus-based discourse analysis on the native English classroom discourse will be beneficial to provide inspirations for the national college English teaching as well as bilingual teaching。

1。3 Thesis Structure文献综述

The thesis is composed of five chapters。 Chapter one contains a brief introduction of the background of the present study, research purpose as well as the thesis structure。

Chapter two gives a brief introduction of discourse analysis as well as corpus linguistics。 Also, corpus linguistic approach to discourse analysis is discussed in this chapter。

Chapter three shows the methodology of research, including corpus-based approach, research tool of AntConc3。4。3w, data collection and research questions。

Chapter four is the analysis and discussion of this paper。 In this section, classroom discourse of Yale University's European Civilization with John Merriman in a self-constructed corpus is to be discussed and analyzed by extracting and interpreting the high-frequency words, collection, clusters, etc。 By the corpus analytical methods, the features of classroom discourse of Yale University's European Civilization with John Merriman will be discussed。