The use of discourse markers in teaching Turkish as a foreign language at B1-B2 levels

This thesis aims to describe how instructors use Discourse Markers (DM) in class, what they think about teaching DMs and which DMs students acquire from B1 to B2. The thesis is valuable fro researchers since it asks the following questions: (i) what is distribution of students'use of DM from B1 to B2 (ii) are the statistically significant differences between students' use of DMs. It uses a case study to arrive at conclusion, a qualitative research method. The subjects are students of Hacettepe University who pass from B1 to B2 level of Turkish (n=10) and language instructors of Bartın University, Hacettepe University and Amasya University. During the fieldwork, students of Hacettepe University who passed from B1 to B2 were interviewed and audio-recorded using Student Interview Form (SIF) for 12 weeks. The recordings were morphologically parsed using CHAT. A new software was developed using Python in order to list DMs used by student for speech flow and information Exchange with the help of CLAN. Using Matplotlib, graphs were created to how the weekly distribution of DMs by each student in both levels of language. Significance of the results were evaluated descriptively. Interviews with the language instructors of Bartın University, Amasya University and Hacettepe University (n=10) were transcribed and descriptively analysed. As the result of the study, it was found that the students WB, MM, MA, KK, AD, AK, OA, MZ, NS, SZ used some DMs in various functions. Most commonly used ones were the pause markers ee, aa, ıı, ıımm, başka. They are followed by ama, ve, evet, yani. Some students never used böyle, öyle, o yüzden, bu yüzden, ondan sonra, bundan sonra, falan, filan, ahh, yani, tabi, tabi ki. The interviews with the instructors revealed that DMs were not part of the teaching process. I conclude from these results that DMs should be included in the curriculums.