Discourse markers in Mandarin L1 and Italian L2 monologue production and their pedagogical implications

The chapter sets out to analyze the usage of DMs by two groups of Italian learners of Chinese and compares learner spoken productions with those of L1 Mandarin Chinese speakers on an identical speaking task. As will be detailed later, we collected video-recorded monologue data from both L1 and L2 speakers on the topic of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy. We focus on form and frequency of DMs used by both the L1 and L2 groups and conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses based on the production data. We will show that interesting differences exist in the data sets and that important questions can be raised about assessing learner proficiency from the perspective of DM use. We suggest that 1) pedagogical improvements need to be made at the discourse level, and 2) the teaching of DM can be done through, among others, input selection, material design and classroom practices.