Students' Perceptions about Course Evaluation: A Discourse Analysis from the Perspective of the Appraisal System

Abstract

This qualitative study is based on a pedagogical action regarding discursive strategies used by university students in evaluating a course in which they are enrolled. The objective is to identify linguistic items using instruments and categories based on theoretical frameworks from the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) perspective (Halliday, 1985; Halliday & Mathiessen, 2014): more specifically, carrying out a discourse analysis through the appraisal system elaborated by Martin and Rose (2003) and Martin and White (2005). The corpus of this research comprises responses to three open-ended evaluation questions to 24 participants. The discourse analysis of students‘evaluations focuses on the perceptions of these learners regarding the course‘s positive and negative aspects. The researcher observed how, through lexicogrammatical choices, students characterize their perceptions of the course using the categories of appreciation and judgment, which are components of the subsystem of attitude, in the appraisal system, considering the types: reaction, composition and valuation and the subcategory capacity. Results indicated that the discourses were marked mainly by the subcategories of reaction quality and valuation relevance.