Metadiscourse has been defined as the discourse used by writers to help their readers connect, interpret and evaluate their attitudes towards the referential material presented (Vande Kopple, 2002). In his study on CEO’s letters, Hyland (1998b) examined metadiscourse as the manifestation of a writer’s linguistic and rhetorical presence in the text and looked at the persuasive nature of business communication. An awareness of the rhetorical power of metadiscourse in this text genre is vital for professional development, particularly in the teaching of business English. This study was designed to examine the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse in Business English writing through an analysis of the Enron Email Dataset and the Business Letter Corpus. The data analysis was conducted following Hyland (2005, 2019), in order to understand how content and discourse are set up to orient and persuade the reader. Although this study focuses specifically on interactional metadiscourse, the results are expected to be relevant for the ESP classroom, particularly in English for Business Communication (EBC) classes (Bhatia & Bremner, 2012). Acquiring conscious awareness of the rules and conventions to master formal writing can be of great help to business students in order for them to become successful writers in both academic and professional environments.
A socio-rhetorical discourse community consists of a group of people who come together to pursue objectives that predate those of socialization and solidarity, and who aim to develop and maintain their own discoursal characteristics. We have examined MOOCs (Massive Open Online courses) and teacher training educational platforms in order to ascertain whether and to what extent they may be identified as networked learning tools and discourse communities characterized by a commonality of goals, mechanisms and procedures of intercommunication, exchange of knowledge, information, as well as specialized genres and their terminology. MOOCs and learning platforms have dramatically changed the way people learn. Starting from ongoing research, we analyze the metadiscoursal features of an ad hoc corpus of online filmed lectures drawn from two MOOC providers (FutureLearn and Coursera). We look at both interactive and interactional resources (to guide the listener through the texts and to involve the listener in the subject), in order to discover how these features are used to control, evaluate and negotiate the communicative goals and impact of the ongoing exchanges. The quantitative and qualitative analysis shows a significant use of metadiscourse markers in the video lectures with a higher frequency of interactional features such as self-mentions, engagement markers, hedges and boosters, rather than interactive ones. These commentaries in the lectures signal the instructors’ attitudes towards the texts and their listeners. Additionally, they were found to perform a rhetorical function since they persuasively reinforce the instructors’ attitude and stance. Thus, their use engages the participants as members of a digital community, where commitment, dedication, and common goals seem to be fundamental features.
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