Metadiscourse is usually studied in terms of a cross-cultural exploration of interpersonality, mainly in academic English, but we believe that this approach could be applied to other genres. The main purpose of this study is to compare some metadiscourse features used in digital business communications. More specifically, we focus on the interactional metadiscourse devices categorised as boosters. We analysed and compared a corpus of one hundred emails written by two groups of non-native speakers of English working in an export company and using English to communicate in a business environment. One group was composed of workers from Spain and the other was composed of workers from China. Our aim was to analyse the differences in the use of boosters and the causes of variation in their use, which may be related to the need to employ assertiveness or politeness in business contexts.
The project presented here reports a learning experience based on virtual exchange and simulation. It aims to know the potential of virtual exchange amongst pre and in-service teachers, and of web-based simulation to broaden the knowledge of future English as a Second Language or Foreign Language teachers (ESL/EFL) on educational issues such as active methodologies, including flipped classroom, shared teaching through Lesson Study, classroom management and the potential of storytelling. For this reason, pre-service teachers in Valencia carry out a simulation through virtual exchanges with future teachers, in-service teachers and university teachers from seven countries: Austria, Norway, Tunisia, the United States, Argentina, England and Romania. Mixed teams are created and a calendar for synchronous meetings is designed through Microsoft Teams. After the exchanges, the pre-service teachers from Valencia hold a reflection session ‘debriefing’ and answer individually a Likert questionnaire about their experience. Furthermore, in-service teachers and university teachers participate in another reflection session to comment on aspects of the proposal. This session, with the contributions from the professionals, gives shape to the following study.
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