Three Minute Thesis Presentations Between Native English Speakers And Chinese Speakers From The Perspective Of Metadiscourse

Three Minute Thesis(3MT)competition,originally launched by the University of Queensland,Australia in 2008,requires doctoral candidates to sententiously convey the main contents of research to a heterogeneous audience,resorting to one slide within three minutes.The competition breaks the conventional mode of speech and stands out among spoken academic genre repertoires in English,praised by universities and research institutes around the world.Subsequently,how contestants stamp personal authority on arguments,accomplish contextual construction and establish interpersonal rapport and how they broaden the target audience and innovate rhetoric deployment has attracted extensive attention from academia.Researchers focus on metadiscourse devices to meditate upon the new academic competitive relationship and investigate the favorable information exchange orchestration between speakers and listeners.Nevertheless,throughout the relevant studies at home and abroad,Chinese participants have not received enough guidance specifically in metadiscourse strategies and rhetorical adjustment.Based on the self-built corpus of 60 3MT presentations,this study examines the rhetorical similarities and differences between native English speakers and Chinese speakers from the perspective of metadiscourse,and analyzes the reasons for the results with quantitative and qualitative approaches,drawing on Hyland’s(2005a)interactive metadiscourse framework and Qiu & Jiang’s(2021)modified model of interactional metadiscourse.This study aims to provide targeted rhetorical suggestions in hope of improving their spoken English for academic purposes.Research findings show that firstly,3MT is characterized by a remarkable interaction with audiences,distinguished by positive audience engagement and explicit construction of personal identity.Although the interactive features of 3MT genre are subordinate to interactional markers,the transitions and frame markers are still prominent.Secondly,the similarities of metadiscourse usage between native English speakers and Chinese speakers are more prominent than their divergences in this study.Chinese speakers share the metadiscourse usage features with native English speakers in the 5 interactive subcategories and 3 interactional subcategories: code glosses,endophoric markers,evidentials,frame markers and its sequencing and goal announcement markers,transitions,attitude markers,hedges,self mentions,and engagement markers in charge of posing questions and directives.Additionally,the significant divergences are mainly reflected in the emphasis on propositional certainty of Chinese speakers and the stress on interpersonal interaction of native English speakers,specifically in frame makers functioning to label stages and shift topic,boosters,engagement markers and its listener mentions and knowledge appeals.Thirdly,the results can be attributed to a battery of aspects,encompassing the transfer of mother tongue,cultural diversity,educational background,interdisciplinary divergence,English proficiency,data internal offset,statistical error and so on.Theoretically,appropriate additions and deletions have been made in the retrieval lists of the study,which contribute to the enrichment of the metadiscourse framework in3 MT genre to a certain extent.Practically,the rhetorical suggestions proposed in the study are instructive to the improvement of Chinese scholars’ academic rhetorical dexterity in English.Furthermore,this study has practical applications for EAP instructors to navigate their way through innovative discursive practices in helping hone academic communication skills of students.