A Comparative Study On Classroom Metadiscourse Between English Teachers From Urban And Rural Secondary Schools

Metadiscourse is generally referred to as “discourse about discourse”.It plays a significant role in construing meaning and cohering the utterance.Previously,empirical studies on metadiscourse have mainly centered in written language,especially academic papers.Compared with metadiscourse studies in written language,metadiscourse studies in spoken language are fewer.They are mainly in academic area,especially seminars in universities.Teacher’s discourse is not only the teaching content in English classes,but also important language resources for students.Therefore,the quality of teachers’ classroom discourse can influence teaching effect.Through effective teaching discourse,students can understand the content of the class easier.Nevertheless,there is no systematic metadiscourse study on classroom discourse.Most of the previous metadiscourse studies under classroom settings focus on the higher education,without paying enough attention to the use of classroom metadiscourse in Chinese secondary school English teachers.For this reason,this study adopts a corpus-based method and conducts a comparative study on metadiscourse use in Chinese urban and rural English class.The corpora adopted in this study are two sub-corpora sampled from the Corpus of Secondary School English Classroom Discourse(CSSECD).With the help of the Conc＿sampler,Text Editor,Anno Tool,Antconc 3.4.3 and Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator,this study analyzes how metadiscourse is used in the two corpora in three dimensions: meta-talk,interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse,and generalizes using features of metadiscourse between English teachers from urban and rural secondary schools.It is found that the metadiscourse using ability of Chinese urban English teacher is significantly higher than that in Chinese rural English teacher.Specifically,(1)two groups of teachers show significant difference in the use of meta-talk and Chinese rural English teachers possess a higher frequency.This indicates that English is more likely to serve as teaching tool in rural English classes but the possible reason may due to the frequent repetition of discourse organization meta-talk.(2)Interactive metadiscourse shows significant difference in the two corpora.Chinese rural English teachers put more emphasis on helping students understand the content of the classes.This might be that their students’ knowledge background is relatively lower.(3)Interactional metadiscourse is the most frequently used metadiscourse in the two corpora.The higher frequency of interactional metadiscourse than that of meta-talk and interactive metadiscourse in both corpora reveals the interactional essence of a class.But Chinese rural English teachers possess higher frequency of directives in their classes,which proves that Chinese rural English classes are more teacher-centered.Therefore,Chinese urban English teachers interact more with their students and they conceive their students as the center in the class.In addition,there are more forms of linguistic realizations of metadiscourse in each category in urban English classes than rural English classes.Based on the previous research findings,this study gives several suggestions for Chinese English teaching.First,this study compares the use of metadiscourse by Chinese urban and rural secondary school English teachers,which helps elementary education teachers reflect on their use of metadiscourse in the classroom,thereby deepening their understanding of metadiscourse.Second,examples of metadiscourse use in this research are available in the compilation of the metadiscourse practical handbook,thus,it can provide a reference for the professional development of teachers.Finally,the comparative study of Chinese urban and rural teachers’ metadiscourse has implications for promoting the fairness of foreign language education and the balanced distribution of foreign language educational resources in different areas.