Spoken Metadiscourse in Malaysian ESL Job Interviews

Abstract

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.

Metadiscourse as a Way of Achieving Persuasion in Literary Criticism Texts

“…When these results are compared to those of previous research on metadiscourse, one can see that there are points of similarities and points of differences. Previous research indicated that interactive markers are used more in written discourses (Hyland & Tse, 2004& Khedri, 2014, whereas interactional markers are used more in spoken discourses (Cavalieri, 2011;Adel, 2012;Yipei & Lingling, 2013;Malmstrom, 2014;Lee & Subtirelu, 2015;Turiman et al, 2018;Mahmood & Kasim, 2019;Mahmood & Kasim, 2021). Even though the texts analyzed in this study are written, interactional markers are used more than interactive markers which can be attributed to the difference in the type of texts and genre (Adel, 2012, p. 93).…”

The onset of English lexical acquisition among Malaysian preschoolers

“…Based on extensive literature search, we found that studies on English language acquisition in the Malaysian context have been mainly carried out on Malaysian tertiary learners and graduates (e.g. Isai et al 2020;Mohd Zin, Eng, and Rafik-Galea 2014;Sarudin et al 2013;Ting et al 2017;Turiman, Abdullah, and Mohd Noor 2018;Zainuddin et al 2018). We posit that to understand the underlying cause of Malaysian learners' English performance, studies investigating learners' development at the earlier level, such as at the preschool levels, are necessary.…”

Metadiscourse Resources across Themes of Islamic Friday Sermon

“…Metadiscourse features are also examined in different disciplines and languages, for example Blagojevic (2004) and Dahl (2004). They are also scrutinised in non-academic spoken discourse as in parliamentary debates (Ilie, 2003), in Malaysian ESL job interviews (Turiman et al, 2018); and in non-academic written discourse specifically in fiction genre (AlJazrawi and AlJazrawi, 2019).…”