Abstract:
This research analysed the oral discourse of final year students of the Department of French of the University of Cape Coast. The students used for the study were those who studied French as a single major course for the first degree. These students were seventeen in all out of the total number of final year French students. The analysis is intended to study how coherence is achieved in the oral discourse of the students by the use of transitional markers. To undertake this research, the data collection tools used were questionnaire and interview. The questionnaires were designed to collect data on the sex, age and the number of languages spoken by the students and also the number of years used to study the French language in general. The interviews, which took the form of an oral presentation were used to collect the data for the analysis of the research. The students randomly chose from a number of selected topics for discussion and had five minutes to organize their thoughts before the presentation. The study revealed that unlike the written discourse, the use of transitional markers in the oral discourse is quite minimal. More so, we find out that even with the transitional markers used in the oral discourse, we noticed a constant use of the same transition marker. Connectives also play a major role in achieving coherence in the micro construction of the discourse. However, in some oral discourses we noticed the wrong use of certain connectives which affect the coherence of the discourse. More so, the topic or the reference is identified as a way of maintaining the flow of the discourse and maintaining the coherence as well.
