Dissertation project

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

The proliferation of the Internet along with various social networks and mobile devices has precipitated far-reaching influence on education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as one of the most recent and popular delivery methods for distance education since 2012, the rapid expansion of which has generated considerable attention from the media and education professionals. Being a new medium, MOOCs do not simply replicate the traditional practice of education but introduce new ways of teaching in the new learning ecology. Yet, surprisingly little is known about how lecturers structure and adapt their discourse to the online asynchronous environment in MOOCs. Hence, this project attempts to address the research gap by giving an in-depth comparison of teachers’ spoken discourse in online and offline academic lecutures, with a focus on the use of metadiscourse in the academic lectures. It seeks to examine how lecturers use Internet to fulfil their communicative and pedagogical needs, how online instruction is both similar to and different from offline communication, and how virtual instruction entails implications on online instructor-student relationship. This project intends to contribute to a better and deeper understanding of language use in cyberspace.