A Multimodal Approach to Metadiscourse as an Organizational Tool

Modal Density in Structuring Segments Containing Organizational Metadiscourse Versus Content Sequences

“…In order to explore the modal density in both structuring segments and content sequences, a dataset of six university lectures in Humanities was compiled from 167 5 which twelve fragments (six structuring segments and six content sequences) were extracted. The dataset comes from a larger study in which 152 lectures were explored (Bernad-Mechó, 2018). The lectures for this study were all extracted from the OpenCourseWare (OCW) offered at Yale University's website.…”

“…Still, only the four more frequent types of organizational metadiscourse, i.e. introducing topic, previewing, reviewing, and contextualizing (Bernad-Mechó, 2018), were considered for the analysis, as the presence of other types of organizational metadiscourse is minimal. These segments were chosen taking into account the first metadiscursive instance in the fragment as the starting point, and the end of the last metadiscursive utterance marking the completion of the segment.…”

“…Once the fragments were selected, they were imported into the tool MMA-Video for their annotation and analysis. Following previous explorations of the use of semiotic resources in lectures (Bernad-Mechó, 2018;Bernad-Mechó & Fortanet-Gómez, 2019;Crawford Camiciottoli, 2015, 2016Tan et al, 2016), the modes that were taken into account in the analysis were: the verbal mode (exploration of metadiscourse vs content language, as well as the percentage of pauses over the total duration of the clips), the use of gestures -iconic, metaphoric, deictic or beats (McNeill, 1992), gaze direction, head movements -iconic or novel (Norris, 2004), posture, proxemics, and facial expressions. The mode of paralanguage, although undoubtedly relevant in multimodal analysis, may become quite subjective when trying to quantify it (Bernad-Mechó, 2018) and, therefore, it was excluded from the analyses.…”

“…It is precisely the study of lecturing styles one of the variables that influences the use of specific combinations of modes (Bernad-Mechó, 2018). In this sense, Dudley-Evans (1994: 148) presents a classification of lecturing styles that establishes three main types of lectures depending on the lecturers' use of notes: a) Reading style: It comprises lectures "in which lecturers either read the lecture or deliver it as if they were reading it".…”

Applying Appraisal Theory for the Interpretation of Experienced Researchers’ Interviews on Open Access

“…The present research will be limited to speech and paralanguage, as the interviews were audio recorded. Moreover, among the paralinguistic elements it will focus on prosody (Roach, Stibbard, Osborne, Arnfield & Setter, 1998) and the contribution of silence, speed, loudness, and syllabic duration to convey hesitation or to intensify verbal messages (Querol-Julián, 2011;Crawford-Camiciottoli, 2015;Bernad-Mechó, 2018).…”