| Metadiscourse is generally considered as discourse about discourse.It plays a vital role in construing meaning and cohering the utterance.Previous metadiscourse research primarily focused on academic and classroom discourses.Only a few studies have centered on metadiscourse in Massive Open Online Courses（MOOCs）.Hence,this study is based on a corpus-based method and Hyland’s（2005）interpersonal model to discover the overall characteristics of metadiscourse in MOOCs and how they differ among course types and teachers with different professional titles.Specifically,the study aims to answer the following three questions:（1）What are the overall characteristics of teachers’ metadiscourse distribution in college English MOOCs?（2）What are the differences in the use of metadiscourse across course types in frequency and functions?（3）What are the differences in the use of metadiscourse across teachers with different professional title in frequency,functions,and frequent lexical items?Based on the above research questions,the corpus includes 24 English courses from mainstream MOOC platforms Xuetang X in China,including 24 English teachers from top universities.Statistical results were presented with qualitative analyses by means of Ant Conc3.5.9（2020）,to discover similarities and differences among metadiscourse usage in frequency and function.This research presents three major findings based on the gathered data.First of all,the study finds that interactional metadiscourse is more than interactive metadiscourse,with engagement markers as the most frequently occurring category,followed by frame markers,transition markers,code glosses,attitude markers,self-mentions,boosters,hedges,endophoric markers,and evidentials.MOOCs teachers tend to attach greater importance to frame markers,transition markers,and code glosses to help learners grasp key points effectively.Secondly,the study reveals that the typical metadiscourse patterns vary with different course types and teachers with different professional titles.Among different course types,English for skill training courses adopt more engagement markers,whereas English for grammatical and vocabulary knowledge courses employ more frame markers and code glosses.Courses in English for literary and cultural knowledge emphasize the use of hedges and engagement markers by raising questions.Thirdly,the study also suggests that teachers with junior professional titles and teachers with senior professional titles have similar habits of using metadiscourse in college English MOOCs.Engagement markers are the most commonly used metadiscourse markers in classroom discourse,followed by transition markers,self-mentions,frame markers,boosters,and hedges.However,the four least used categories are endophoric markers,code gloss,attitude markers,and evidentials.Moreover teachers with junior professional titles employ a bit more engagement markers than teachers with senior professional titles,while teachers with senior professional titles use a bit more hedges.Besides,teachers with senior professional titles tend to use more boosters than teachers with junior professional titles.Furthermore,the differences indicate that teachers with different professional titles have different preferences towards the specific category of metadiscourse,due to different considerations.In conclusion,this article has examined the overall pattern of English teachers’ metadiscourse usage in college English MOOCs and how it differs across course types and teachers with different titles.This study aims to raise college English teachers more attention to metadiscourse and to provide some implications for the construction of college English MOOCs. |
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