Various job interview skills training have been carried out to prepare students for employment. However, the outcome of job interviews is questionable, as one of the reasons for unemployment among Malaysian graduates is their inability to communicate competently in job interviews. The Malaysia Education Blueprint 2015-2025 (Higher Education) stated that unemployed graduates were also lacking in a strong command of English. Since job interviews are placed heavily on verbal exchanges between the interviewer and job candidate, the role that language plays in interaction is worth exploring. This paper investigates spoken metadiscourse in 16 actual first-stage technical and non-technical Malaysian ESL job interviews. Corpus linguistics was employed for data analysis. An adapted framework of spoken metadiscourse is employed to analyse the types and frequencies of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse in the corpus. The findings revealed that both textual and interpersonal metadiscourse were used, but there are variations in the distribution and composition of metadiscourse in the two categories across disciplines. Excessive use of metadiscourse was found to impede communication flow instead of assisting speakers to be persuasive in their speech. This implies the need for targeted instruction on metadiscourse, specifically among language learners in higher learning institutions to facilitate appropriate usage of metadiscourse in speech.
Writers engage different types of metadiscourse markers in interacting with the readers. They provide indicators in their writing of the contents to help readers comprehend and respond to the text. This paper is a preliminary study to identify types and categories of metadiscourse found in a corpus of undergraduate academic projects (UAP corpus). This study is significant as it identifies types and categories of metadiscourse found in both good and weak undergraduate academic writing. Hence, this study is relevant to further support related research on the use of metadiscourse among tertiary level students to write effectively in academic writing. Since metadiscourse has never been directly taught as a subject to undergraduate students, it may contribute to the lack of awareness on metadiscourse functions in effective writing. In this study, the metadiscourse items in UAP corpus are identified and rated by inter-raters. It is a corpus-based research study that involves collecting, analyzing, and using qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify metadiscourse items in the corpus.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.