A Study Of Microblog Texts About Education Reform From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As a social media platform based on user relationships,microblog is convenient for users to share,transmit,and acquire information.In recent years,microblog has played an increasingly important role in social issues by promoting process of events,expressing public opinion and providing basis for government to make decisions.Education reform has been a heated social issue on account of its close relation with social interest and the public actively participate in the discussion.Microblog posts about education reform contain an abundance of different opinions in which complex relationships are constructed,so it is worthy to make a linguistic analysis of stances and attitudes from the texts and uncover the interpersonal function of microblogs.Based on the framework of Appraisal theory proposed by Martin and White(2005),this study investigates the use of appraisal resources in microblog texts.Data in this study consist of 103 posts about education reform released during 2015 to 2017 by 4 official microblog accounts.According to the content,the posts are classified as two major groups:information group and commentary group.Appraisal resources in the posts are labelled and examined by Attitude,Engagement and Graduation systems in order to reveal appraisal strategies employed by official microblogs and interpersonal functions realised through appraisal.Major findings are as follows.(1)Microblog posts of the information group generally express positive appraisal towards education reform,while a small part of posts in the commentary group express negative appraisal.Microblog posts contain abundant appraisal resources which can be found at lexical,grammatical and discursive levels.Attitude system is at the heart of appraisal system in official microblogs,in which judgement resources outnumber affect and appreciation.The engagement system mainly consists of heteroglossia and dialogic expansion is more frequently employed than dialogic contraction.The graduation resources show a preference to force rather than focus.(2)Official microblogs manifest authority by releasing real-time information about dynamic development of education reform.The posts selected in this study cover a wide range of appraisal objects about education reform,including current condition,achievements,future,as well as failures,indicating the process of education reform over time.Voices come from government,media,education practitioners and ordinary users,reflecting extensive social participation.(3)Through appraisal means,official microblogs realise functions of releasing information,guiding positive public opinion and interacting with users.Thus,they can meet the information needs of the audience,indicating stance of the government and mainstream media while communicating with users in an equal position.In microblogs,the audience actively participate in discursive practice rather than passively receive information and opinions.