Exploring metadiscourse in university lectures in Hong Kong

Abstract

 Comprehending university lectures poses considerable challenges especially to students in English-as-a-Lingua Franca (ELF) contexts and the use of metadiscourse by lecturers is one major factor. Metadiscourse is a collection of language features used to help the writer /speaker to express a viewpoint and engage with readers/listeners. Hong Kong is a typical ELF region but was rarely researched pertaining this topic. This dissertation makes a contribution to fill this gap. It adopted a corpus-based approach, using Hyland’s (2005a) interpersonal model for the analysis of interactional metadiscourse in 24 university lectures in Hong Kong. First, every metadiscourse item in a given list was searched electronically by a concordance tool. This list was adapted from Hyland’s (2005a) list of metadiscourse items investigated. Second, every concordance line was examined manually to analyze the use of the metadiscourse item. The findings showed that interactional metadiscourse was pervasive and played an important role in the university lectures. Overall, consistent with previous literature, engagement makers are the most frequently utilized category, followed by self-mentions, hedges, boosters and attitude markers, which four all belong to stance markers. In comparison across disciplines, hard sciences lecturers used more engagement resource and boosters than their counterparts in soft sciences. When facing different audiences, class lecturers employed more engagement markers while public lecturers utilized more expressions of stance. These findings uncovered a general picture of the use of metadiscourse in university lectures in Hong Kong and can be of help to English-for-academic (EAP) pedagogy.