The development of disfluency strategies in L2 English: A pragmatic analysis of discourse marker use by school-age Arab learners
Vol.19,No.1(2026)
Discourse and Interaction
Discourse markers (DMs) play a significant role in spoken communication, assisting in coherence and fluency in first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. Understanding the use of these markers as disfluency strategies can inform language teaching by highlighting the significance of real-world communication skills. Researchers often focus on studying the use of these markers to unveil their various functions in spoken discourse and as signals of speakers’ pragmatic competence. However, there is little research on how L2 children employ speech management strategies such as DMs or filled pauses to overcome disfluency in their interactions. This study aims to explore how school-age Arab children learning English as an additional language employ DMs with other disfluency strategies (i.e., filled pauses and repetition) to manage disfluency in their speech by analyzing natural spoken data in a corpus of children’s speech. Results show that school-age Arab children employ the five most frequent DMs in the corpus (like, yeah, okay, so and oh) in co-occurrence with filled pauses and repetitions to serve primarily disfluency functions. The study contributes to the field of disfluency studies by offering insights into how Arabic-speaking child learners of English use discourse markers along with other strategies to manage disfluency and develop L1-like interactional patterns, thereby shedding light on the acquisition of pragmatic and interactional competence in L2 children.
child second language; Arabic-speaking children; pragmatic competence; English as an additional language; discourse markers; disfluency; filled pauses; self-repair
Nuha Alharbi
Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia
Nuha Alharbi works as a lecturer at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Al-kharj, Saudi Arabia. She is also a researcher in corpus linguistics and holds a PhD from Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, child language and second
language acquisition.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3033-6907
Address: Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, AL-kharj, Saudi Arabia. [e-mail: alharbi.nuha88@gmail.com]
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