In English language teaching, the teacher's verbal communication including asking questions and feedback on students' responses is essential for students' language input and learning. This communication is not only used as a teaching tool, but also as a key resource for students' language learning. Therefore, the study of teachers' discourse is of great significance for revealing the real teaching situation of language classrooms and improving the teaching effect, which is also a long-term focus in the field of language teaching. However, there are problems with the comprehensibility of the teacher's discourse in actual classroom communication, which often leads to communication failure. In order to improve the intelligibility of teachers' discourse, researchers have begun to explore this issue from a pragmatic perspective, rather than just focusing on phonetics, intonation, and grammatical structures. Based on the association theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, this study analyzes the real communication between teachers and students in junior high school English classrooms from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. Ten reading lessons in the real teaching classroom of junior high school English were selected as the research corpus. The study regards Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework and conducts a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the use of spoken discourse markers by senior high school English teachers in reading classes. Ten reading lessons were taken from the teaching content of the eighth-grade people's education version. By analyzing the actual records of junior high school English teachers' discourse, this study explores the nature of teacher-student communication and identify the factors that affect classroom communication from a cognitive perspective. This study aims to address the following two questions: (1) How are spoken discourse markers distributed in junior high school English reading classes, and what characterizes their usage by teachers? (2) According to Relevance Theory, what are the pragmatic roles of the top three most frequently utilized spoken discourse markers by teachers in junior high school reading classes? The research provides a systematic analysis of the distribution and pragmatic functions of the three most commonly used spoken discourse markers in junior high school English reading classes, examining how teachers employ these markers to optimize communication.

Xue Sun. A Study of Teachers’ Discourse Markers in Junior High English Reading Classroom within the Framework of Relevance Theory. International Journal of Educational Curriculum Management and Research (2025), Vol. 6, Issue 1: 115-124. https://doi.org/10.38007/IJECMR.2025.060114.

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