A Study Of Metadiscourse In Spoken Academic Discourse

In recent years, metadiscourse has become an increasingly attractive topic in researchfield of language. Metadiscourse serves as a special structure of discourse, being taken forgranted as discourse about discourse. Moreover, it expresses the author’s standpoints andreflects the relationship among texts, writers and readers. However, in the existing studies onmetadiscourse, much attention is paid to written academic discourse, leaving spoken academicdiscourse almost untouched.Based on Hyland’s (2005a,2005b) theory on metadiscourse, this study aims to explorethe features of metadiscourse and its interpersonal functions in student presentations throughthe qualitative and quantitative analysis of the sub-corpus STP (student presentations) inMICASE corpus. This paper mainly studies on three aspects of metadiscourse:(1) thedistribution of metadiscourse in student presentations;(2) the interpersonal functions of eachsub-category of metadiscourse in student presentations;(3) a comparative study on the use ofmetadiscourse in spoken academic discourse and that in written academic discourse.The findings of the present study reveal that metadiscourse resources are widely used instudent presentations, and that interactional resources are used more frequently thaninteractive resources. Among the overall patterns of metadiscourse markers, none is morepervasive than engagement markers. As to interactive metadiscourse, transitions and codeglosses are used more frequently, while at the interactional dimension, engagement markersand self mentions are most commonly used. Further analysis indicates that in studentpresentations, different metadiscourse resources perform different interpersonal functions.Interactive resources help the speaker organize a logical and coherent presentation, whileinteractional resources contribute to construct interaction between the speaker and theaudience. In addition, our comparative study demonstrates that, in written academic discourse,interactive metadiscourse are used more frequently. In the spoken academic discourse,engagement markers represent the largest portion whereas in the written discourse, rank last.T-test shows that the above differences are significant. This study possibly furthers our understanding on spoken academic discourse and hassome pedagogical implications. It may help students to use metadiscourse properly indelivering a better presentation.