Metadiscourse in Academic Lectures: A Comparative Analysis of MOOCs and University Lectures

The proliferation of the Internet along with various social networks and mobile deviceshas precipitated far-reaching influence on education. Massive Open Online Courses(MOOCs) have emerged as one of the most recent and popular delivery methods fordistance education since 2012, the rapid expansion of which has generated considerableattention from the media and education professionals. Being a new medium, MOOCs donot simply replicate the traditional practice of education but introduce new ways ofteaching in the new learning ecology. Yet, surprisingly little is known about howlecturers structure and adapt their discourse to the online asynchronous environment inMOOCs. Hence, this project attempts to address the research gap by giving an in-depthcomparison of teachers' spoken discourse in online and offline academic lectures, with afocus on the use of metadiscourse in the academic lectures. It seeks to examine howlecturers use Internet to fulfill their communicative and pedagogical needs, how onlineinstruction is both similar to and different from offline communication, and how virtualinstruction entails implications on online instructor-student relationship. Corpus-basedapproach will be employed in this project to study metadiscourse in the genre ofacademic lecture in MOOCs and university setting. This project intends to contribute to abetter and deeper understanding of language use in cyberspace.