The Study of Interpersonal Metadiscourse Markers in English Medium Academic Lectures by Native and Nonnative English Speakers

• Main Authors: Omar Camara, 卡馬拉
• Other Authors: Chia-Yen Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/74634332923582578914

碩士 === 元智大學 === 應用外語學系 === 104 === The term metadiscourse is a linguistic device first coined by Zellig Harris in 1959 and it refers to linguistic features that a writer or a speaker uses to help guide their audience through the discourse and also show their stance to subject without referring to the subject itself. It is a device that according to Hyland (2005) helps the speaker or a writer achieve effective communication. Due to its significance, a number of studies have been conducted on it both in writing genre and spoken genre. However, very limited studies have been conducted on the subject. Most of the previous studies have been conducted on metadiscourse in writing genre. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the scanty nature of the study of metadiscourse in spoken academic data. A number of taxonomies have been developed on metadiscourse. One such taxonomy is the one proposed by Vande Kopple (1985). Vande Kopple’s taxonomy classifies metadiscourse into textual and interpersonal resources. Textual resources help guide the reader through the text III while interpersonal resources help writers to express their reactions and also show their reactions to the propositional content. However, According to Hyland and Tse (2004), all metadiscourse resources are interpersonal. They classified metadiscourse into interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers. This study draws on Hyland and Tse’s (2004) model to explore the use of metadiscourse in English medium academic lectures by British English speakers and Taiwanese Mandarin speakers. Two lectures were selected one from Applied linguistics and one from Management for each lingua-culture background for analysis. The results of the study show that overall; Taiwanese Mandarin speakers use a higher frequency of metadiscourse than their British counterparts. However, British English speakers use more different elements in their lectures than do Taiwanese Mandarin speakers.