A Corpus-based Study Of Interactional Metadiscourse In Academic Spoken English

Nowadays,more and more scholars have recognized that the ability to build up an appropriate relationship with the audience is crucial to the success of academic interaction.Accordingly,recent years have witnessed a spurt of researches on interactional metadiscourse.To investigate the use of interactional metadiscourse across disciplines in academic spoken discourse,the author collects some transcripts of academic speech events from MICASE corpus and builds four corpora,namely,Biological and Health Sciences,Physical Sciences and Engineering,Humanities and Arts,Social Sciences and Education.With the support of Ant Conc 3.5.7,stance resources listed by Hyland(2005a)and engagement resources listed by Hyland & Jiang(2016)can be automatically searched and some collocation features of those resources can be found.Also,it is vital to manually judge whether each item is a metadiscourse according to the context.After obtaining the initial frequency across disciplines,the author carries out standardized frequency processing and Chi-square test.It is Loglikelihood and Chi-square Calculator 1.0 that is adopted to examine whether there are significant differences in using interactional resources between hard and soft fields.Then,the grammatical distribution of interactional markers is explored.Finally,based on the statistical data,qualitative analysis is conducted to probe into the reasons behind.It is concluded that both stance and engagement are frequently used in academic spoken interaction.However,while speakers in soft knowledge fields tend to employ more stance features,hard field speakers use more engagement markers with the exception of appeals to shared knowledge.First of all,hedges are preferred by soft field speakers,as most of their statements are interpretative and lack the support of clear grounds.And it’s surprising that the frequencies of Biological and Health Sciences is higher than that in Humanities and Arts,mainly brought by the uncertainty of the former.In addition,speakers in soft fields tend to directly express their feelings using lexical verbs.Besides,speakers in Biological and Health Sciences use more adverbials to reduce their commitment.Secondly,soft field speakers rely more on boosting expressions to show certainty.As for adverbials,while really is preferred by speakers in soft disciplines,actually is used more frequently by hard science speakers.What’s more,while soft field speakers prefer to use subjective verbs such as think and believe to emphasize personal opinions,speakers in hard sciences show preference for verbs expressing evidential or implicit truth like show and establish to enhance the objectivity of their statements.Thirdly,speakers in soft fields rely more on attitude markers to increase personal credibility.Speakers in all disciplines frequently stress the importance or make suggestions using evaluative adjectives important.Fourthly,speakers in soft knowledge field use more self-references.And they tend to use singular forms of self-mentions.In contrast,speakers in hard sciences prefer to use plural forms.This is mainly because cooperative research is more common in hard fields.Finally,it is interesting to note that speakers in hard fields employ more engagement markers,particularly in Physical Sciences and Engineering.Among them,directives,particularly modals and first person inclusive let’s and let us,are more appealing to hard science speakers.In this way,they can show their claims more precisely and economically.The study can provide some enlightenment for researchers to establish a good academic interaction with the audience.Also,it can enhance the explanatory power of Hyland’s(2005a)interactional metadiscourse model to the study of academic spoken English.