A Comparative Study On Teachers’ MOOC Interactive Metadiscourse

The Massive Open Online Course(MOOC),which is sweeping higher education,has drawn attentions from scholars at home and abroad to carry out multifarious researches.However,there is hardly any research on interactive metadiscourse in the teacher talk in a MOOC context.Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted in this study to explore the similarities and differences of the use and distribution of interactive metadiscourse in the two teachers’ MOOCs,and possible factors that contribute to these similarities and differences are also displayed.The definition and classification of interactive metadiscourse is based on Hyland’s metadiscourse model.AntConc 3.4.3 and Chi-square are adopted to facilitate statistics and analysis of the research.Retrieval statistical data indicates significant similarities and differences between the two teachers in the MOOC context.Similarities are presented as follows: 1)the two teachers both frequently use interactive metadiscourse in the MOOC context;2)the two teachers similarly prefer to use transition markers,frame markers and code glosses rather than endophoric markers and evidentials in MOOC discourse;3)the variety of linguistic items of each subcategory of interactive metadiscourse in AMC is similar to that in CMC.Nonetheless,the two corpora illustrate obvious significant differences:(1)the American teacher is prone to employ more interactive metadiscourse than the Chinese teacher;(2)the American teacher uses much more frame markers and code glosses than the counterpart;(3)the Chinese teacher uses more sequencers than the American teacher.These similarities are attributed to genre features as well as cohesion conventions and these differences are due to writer/reader responsible styles and cultural thought patterns.This thesis carries out a comparative study on interactive metadiscourse used in MOOC discourse to probe the general use and distribution of the interactive metadiscourse in MOOC discourse,also unearth the similarities and differences in interactive metadiscourse used in English MOOCs between the Chinese teacher and the American teacher,and explore the factors resulting in these similarities and differences.