A Study Of High School English Teachers' Classroom Metadiscourse Under Hyland's Interpersonal Model

Any discourse consists of two levels:the level of primary discourse and the level of metadiscourse.If we say that primary discourse is about the information we want to deliver,then,metadiscourse is about the means we deliver these information effectively.Teachers'discourse,a particular form of academic discourse,is the main means of classroom teaching;and the use of metadiscourse in teachers' discourse is even indispensable.In consequence,based on the related researches of metadiscourse by scholars at home and abroad,the present study combines the author's investigation on high school English teachers,metadiscourse in classroom and explores how these teachers use metadiscourse in classroom teaching under the framework of Hyland's(2005)interpersonal model of metadiscourse.30 videos of English high-quality lessons which are later transcribed into text form as the corpus of the present study are selected.The software of 'AntConc 3 4.4w(Windows)2014' is applied to index and work out the frequency of metadiscourse.Through constructing a corpus(there are totally 73,615 occurrences of metadiscourse),the study analyzes the self-constructed corpus both quantitatively and qualitatively.This thesis mainly focuses on two research questions which are the distribution and features of teachers'classroom metadiscourse,and the functions that metadiscourse markers achieve in teaching activities.It attempts to find out how teachers integrate metadiscourse into their classroom discourse to attain the aim of promoting language teaching.The results show that there are totally 14,685 occurrences of metadiscourse markers in the self-constructed corpus,with 199.48 occurrences per 1,000 words,among which interactive metadiscourse markers account for 55.56 occurrences per 1,000 words,and interactional ones account for 143.92 occurrences per 1,000 words.Among the ten sub-categories of metadiscourse,engagement markers are the most frequently used metadiscourse markers followed by frame markers,self mention,transitions,boosters,hedges,endophoric markers,attitude markers,code glosses,and evidentials.All these 10 sub-categories of metadiscourse are pervasively distributed in teachers' classroom metadiscourse,and the interactional metadiscourse markers occupy a dominant position in high school English teachers' classroom metadiscourse.Each category of metadiscourse realizes its specific function to help teachers promote their interaction with students and finish their teaching tasks effectively.