A Contrastive Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In Teacher Talk Of Chinese And American College Online Open Courses Based On The Appraisal Theory

Teacher Talk(hereafter TT)is the language used by teacher in the classroom to impart knowledge,organize classroom activities and interact with students,which has been playing an important role in class.Scholars at home and abroad have conducted many researches on it.With the development of technology,many excellent classes have been brought on the Internet.As a new way of teaching,College Online Open Course is a hot topic for scholars to study.It's also a kind of tendency for future teaching.Chinese College Online Open Course(hereafter CCOOC)are developed almost simultaneously with American College Online Open Course(hereafter ACOOC).Compared with ACOOC,CCOOC developed relatively slowly and faced with a lot of problems.For instance,low rating results in waste of the course resources and so on.J.R.Martin and Peter White put forward the Appraisal Theory in the 1990 s,ever since,which has caught many scholars' attention at home and abroad.The Appraisal Theory consists of three sub-systems: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Among them,Attitude resources are the core of the Appraisal system,which can be divided into Affect,Judgement and Appreciation.Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted in the study.The data are selected from NetEase,which includes four courses(every course involves one topic)from Harvard University and eight courses(every two courses involve one topic)from Tsinghua university.Moreover,topics of the two kinds of courses are similar,which are both about positive psychology.The study aims to explore and contrast the distribution features of the Attitudinal resources in Teacher Talk of CCOOC and that of ACOOC and find out the reasons that lead to the differences.Finally,the author will put forward some suggestions for teachers engaged in CCOOC.The results are as follows,Affect resources are the largest amount in TT of CCOOC and the proportion of Appreciation resources is the largest in TT of ACOOC.And un/happiness resources are the dominant ones both in TT of CCOOC and that ofACOOC.As for Judgement resources,Capacity and Propriety resources are used the most in TT of CCOOC.While Capacity and Veracity are the most frequently used ones in TT of ACOOC.As for Appreciation resources,Reaction ranks the first both in TT of CCOOC and that of ACOOC.While Valuation is the second most used resource in TT of CCOOC and Composition ranks the second in TT of ACOOC.By comparison,the author finds that the Attitudinal resources used in TT of CCOOC are relatively more subjective than those in TT of ACOOC.The main reason that leads to the difference is different cultural and language background between China and America.On the one hand,the thesis shows that the Appraisal Theory can be used to analyze the newly-developing online open courses.On the other hand,the author finds that choosing appropriate Attitudinal resources for different kinds of topics will make the course more attractive for students and it's also beneficial to establish harmonious interpersonal relationship in classroom.