An Analysis on Discourse Markers in Lectures on Old English

As a crucial part of teachers’ utterance, discourse markers play a vital role in the verbal communication between teachers and students in class. This paper collects the discourse markers from Lecture on Old English, a series of lectures delivered by Prof. Stuart D. Lee on Netease Online Open Courses. It is found that Prof. Lee frequently uses some discourse markers like “if”,“and”, “so”, “but” and so on to extend an idea, explain the cause, and make comparison so as to make his utterances more fluent and logical, which reduces the efforts that students need to make in understanding his utterances.