| Stance markers reveal the speaker’s attitude,judgment and evaluation to the proposition.They not only help convey information,but also play an important role in interpersonal interaction between speakers and audience.According to Hyland’s metadiscourse framework,stance can be expressed by the following metadiscourse markers: hedges,boosters,attitude markers and self-mentions(Hyland,2005).Stance markers used in teachers’ talk can reflect their attitude towards the teaching content and students,helping in constructing their own identity.In recent years,scholars at home and abroad have made abundant research on stance and had some achievements.Although many researchers have realized the importance of stance markers and pay attention to the usage features of them in different registers,most of which are concerned with the use of stance markers in written discourse.There are only a small part of empirical studies on spoken discourse,among which studies about teacher talk are mostly based on corpus of classroom courses(Yan Tao,2010;Zhang Man et al,2017;Dongyun Zhang & Diyun Sheng,2021).There are rare studies concentrated on the use of stance markers in the teacher talk of MOOC.In the post-epidemic era,MOOC,as the main form of currently teaching courses,have been featured by higher openness,briefer lectures,the invisibility and universality of learners as chief driving force compared with classroom teaching(Dongyun Zhang & Diyun Sheng,2021).Thus,teacher’s metadiscourse strategies play an important role in enhancing students’ understanding and implicit interactions.Compared with classroom courses,what are the typical features of College English teachers’ stance expression in MOOC? This thesis aims to answer this question through comparing similarities and differences of stance expression between teacher talk in MOOC and classroom courses,thus helping online foreign language teachers establish metadiscourse awareness and improving metadiscourse strategies as well as providing empirical support for the theoretical development of English metadiscourse framework.This paper takes Hyland(2005)’s metadicourse classification as theoretical framework,and constructs two self-built corpus based on 11 teachers’ online College English course in Chinese University’s MOOC(www.course163.org)and 15 teachers’ classroom course of College English separately.The selected corpus ensures the comparability,equality and similarity of teacher level and research data.The research applies corpus analysis and the Ant Conc3.5.8(2019)to explore the characteristics of stance markers usage of teacher talk and corresponding causes affecting these stance features in the two different teaching modes and different teaching procedures(lead-in,text study and supplementary knowledge),then figure out the features of online teachers stance construction.Research questions in this research are shown as following:(1)What are the general characteristics of stance marker use in teacher talk of MOOC and classroom courses?(2)What are the features of frequency,distribution and collocation of four types of stance markers(hedges,boosters,attitude markers and self-mentions)in teacher talk of different teaching procedures in the two courses?(3)How do MOOC and classroom teachers express stance? What are the reasons leading to similarities and differences?The findings are as following:(1)In general,both MOOC and classroom teachers use a certain amount of stance markers since the total frequency of stance markers in classroom teacher talk are higher than MOOC.However,self-mentions aside,other stance markers are used more frequently in MOOC than in classroom.Specifically,hedges and attitude markers are used more in MOOC,while boosters and self-mentions are used more in classroom courses.This shows that teachers in MOOC are more cautious and objective in their discourse style when facing a large audience,and avoid directly mentioning themselves.Classroom courses,however,have limited class size,thus teachers almost know every student quite well,which leads to that teachers in classroom courses have a stronger authoritative status and tend to express themselves more directly.(2)All the sample courses consist of the same move structure: lead-in,text study and supplementary knowledge.In terms of the usage of four stance markers in three different moves,there are some similarities and differences between the two types of courses.First,most of hedges in MOOC are concentrated in the text study part,while lead-in part presents the lowest frequency.Whereas in classroom courses,text study part shows the lowest frequency.This may be caused by the fact that lead-in part in MOOC has a relative fixed mode,leaving less room for negotiation.Second,boosters in supplementary knowledge part present much higher frequency in classroom courses than MOOC.This has proved that teachers prefer to present more objective stance and avoid expressing extreme certainty and affirmation in lead-in and text study parts.However,in the part of supplementary knowledge which contains a large amount of discussion on topics,teachers may choose a more powerful and firm way to emphasize ideas and convince students.Third,the distribution of attitude markers is low in both courses and distributed unevenly in classroom courses,with much fewer frequencies in lead-in and supplementary knowledge parts.In particular,they appear more in the part of cultural knowledge and social life guidance in the step of supplementary knowledge.Fourth,the distribution of self-mentions in MOOC is very uneven,which mostly exist in lead-in and supplementary knowledge parts.However,in classroom courses,self-mentions have a higher frequency in all three kinds of teaching steps,and the distribution is more balanced.Furthermore,it can be concluded from the high-frequent collocations of self-mentions that teachers in MOOC tend to avoid direct self-expression and prefer to present more objective stance,such as “I would,I have,I had,I am”,etc.,while teachers in classroom courses usually use collocations with personal cognitive stance to present their own stance and opinions directly,including “I will,I want,I think”,etc.This finding indicates that teachers may present different stance features under different teaching communication modes.(3)Results have shown different characteristics of stance expression in the two courses.In MOOC,teachers mainly apply hedges and avoid self-mentions to present relatively implicit,indirect,prudent,amiable and guiding stance features.The reasons may be that MOOC have a large amount of audience,and teachers and students are not familiar with each other in online context.Also,in order to build a proper teacher-student relationship and a harmonious class atmosphere,teachers will keep reserved and relatively cautious in expressing stance.Whereas in classroom courses,teachers tend to present stance in the explicit,direct,firm,dominant and authoritative way.This is because teachers in classroom courses are in the authoritative and dominant position.Also the class size is relatively small,and the relationship between teachers and students is relatively close.Therefore,teachers will be more firm and direct in expressing their stance and dare to express themselves.This study discussed the role and features of stance markers in MOOC,meanwhile,it is reasonable for teachers to take effective ways and strategies of metadiscourse in helping construct their own stance,and further raise metadiscourse awareness through the analysis of stance markers of teacher talk in the two types of courses,which is of great importance for online courses’ development.In addition,this study also confirms that non-realtime teacher talk as an independent register,whose metadiscourse features are different from those in classroom courses and should be given due attention. |
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