A Study On Teachers’ Classroom Metadiscourse Of Net Ease Open Course

Many scholars both at home and abroad have done researches on metadiscourse from different perspectives, most of which focus on written discourse. However, few studies have been done on spoken language. During the past 20 years, teacher talk has been a focus of researches, most of which are studies on teacher talk features and second language acquisition. But there is hardly any research about teacher talk of online open course. So this thesis studies metadiscourse of Harvard University’s online open courses and takes the cases of Positive Psychology and Justice from Net Ease.Based on Hyland’s(2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this thesis adopts corpus-based approach. A corpus is constructed with 101,162 words in total. It contains 6 classes of Harvard University’s Positive Psychology and 6 classes of Harvard University’s Justice. With the aid of the analytical software Ant Conc 3.2.2, the thesis aims to explore the uses of interactive and interactional metadiscourse and to discover the regular metadiscourse patterns adopted by teachers of the Net Ease Open Course.Findings show that there are 19,143 occurrences of metadiscourse with 39.41% interactive resources and 60.59% interactional resources respectively. Among the ten subcategories of metadiscourse markers, engagement markers rank the first followed by transitions, self mentions, frame markers, boosters, hedges, attitude markers, code glosses, endophoric markers and evidential. Through the uses of metadiscourse, teachers get their discourse well organized and interact with the audience actively. So it is instructional for teachers to apply them into their own teaching. This study not only broadens the scope of metadiscourse, but is also meaningful for teacher education and development.