A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of English Teachers’ Metadiscourse In Senior High School Massive Open Online Courses

The dual role of teacher talk in EFL lessons as both the major source of target language input and the media to impart knowledge to learners prompts EFL teachers to consciously reflect on their own language performance.Metadiscourse,one of the most important issues for them to consider,is an important discoursal device of great essence in helping teachers effectively steer learners to understand and participate in courses.Moreover,the development of MOOCs has recently become one of the vital issues in Chinese educational field.Therefore,to help promote the construction of MOOCs in China,it is necessary to focus on how to make good use of metadiscourse in the MOOCs with English as teaching language.Based on a self-built corpus around 18,024 words(The Corpus of MOOCs for Senior High School,CMSHS)and interpersonal model put forward by the well-known applied linguist Ken Hyland,this study is aimed to explore the overall pattern of metadiscourse in MOOCs and differences across course type and teachers’ gender.The corpus covers 24 courses from domestic mainstream MOOC platforms,involving 24 teachers from different high-quality senior high schools in China.Then,by means of AntConc 3.5.7(2018)and Chi-Square Calculator,statistical results have been presented with qualitative analysis to find out similarities and differences in frequency and function of metadiscourse usage.The research has found that there are 2,135 occurrences of metadiscourse with 118.45 metadiscourse items per thousand words in CMSHS.Interactional metadiscourse(71.96 ptw,60.75%)is more than interactive metadiscourse(46.49 ptw,39.25%)with engagement markers(57.70 ptw,48.71%)as the most frequently-used category,followed by frame markers,transition markers,code glosses,self mentions,attitude markers,hedges,boosters,endophoric markers,and evidentials.Compared with metadiscourse in realistic classroom,teachers in MOOCs tend to adopt metadiscourse much less frequently,especially in the category of attitude markers and self mentions.By contrast,they attach more importance to frame markers,transition markers,and code glosses to help learners grasp key points efficiently.Moreover,the higher usage of accuracy-oriented hedges than other kinds of hedges reflects that they value the credibility in their discourse.This is probably aroused by the distinctive features of MOOCs including its wider openness,the brevity of lectures,invisible learners,etc.,Besides,there are also some other findings based on functional analysis in this research including further classification on hedges and directives.What’s more,it is also found that the typical patterns of metadiscourse are closely related to course type and teachers’ gender.Among different course types,English for Skill Training courses stressing procedural knowledge adopts more engagement markers,while English for Grammatical and Vocabulary Knowledge courses focusing on declarative knowledge pay more attention to frame markers and code glosses.English for Literary and Cultural Knowledge courses stress the usage of hedges and engagement markers by raising questions.In addition,male teachers are found to adopt more metadiscourse,especially in boosters and engagement markers,than female teachers who have instead used more code glosses.Besides,this research has also found some differences existing in teachers’ preference to specific linguistic items.To summarize,this research has mainly explored the overall pattern of English teachers’ metadiscourse usage in senior high school MOOCs and the differences across course type and teachers’ gender with the aim of arousing senior high school teachers’ wider attention to metadiscourse and bringing some conducive implications to the construction of the MOOCs conveyed in English.