EFL Lecturers’ Metadiscourse in Chinese University MOOCs Across Course Types

Abstract

With the spread of COVID-19 in China at the beginning of 2020, MOOCs, as a kind of currently popular online learning resource, have played a dominant role in higher education field. However, chiefly focusing on teaching organization and learning process in MOOCs, previous studies have paid inadequate attention to lecturers’ discourse. In order to provide some useful views on this issue, this study investigates EFL lecturers’ metadiscourse in Chinese university MOOCs to sketch its distinctive pattern across course types. Based on a self-built corpus, this research adopted interpersonal model as theoretical foundation and analyzed the frequency and functions of metadiscourse by AntConc 3.5.7 and IBM SPSS 23. Findings suggest that specific educational context in MOOCs leads to low frequency of metadiscourse and its use is mainly aimed at the enhancement of intelligibility, reliability, and interactivity. Besides, course types with different knowledge structures also exert certain influence on metadiscourse usage. Course types focusing on procedural knowledge (i.e. the knowledge related to practical process) tend to apply metadiscourse to enhance intelligibility and interactivity, while the ones stressing declarative knowledge (i.e. the knowledge related to explicit facts) attach more importance to reliability. Lastly, the paper concludes with implications for EFL lecturers’ metadiscourse in Chinese university MOOCs.