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Part of
Engagement in Professional Genres
Edited by Carmen Sancho Guinda
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 301] 2019
► pp. 321–340

Chapter 17
Organizational metadiscourse across lecturing styles

Engagement beyond language

| Universitat Jaume I (UJI), Castelló de la Plana, Spain
| Universitat Jaume I (UJI), Castelló de la Plana, Spain

This chapter investigates the use of organizational metadiscourse across three different lecturing styles: reading, conversational and rhetorical (Dudley-Evans 1994). Despite the fact that organizational metadiscourse has not traditionally been considered as conveying engagement, we claim that all metadiscourse can perform this function. Although metadiscourse in spoken lectures has received increasing interest in the last decades, to our knowledge there is no study comparing the use of metadiscourse throughout lecturing styles from a multimodal perspective and highlighting engagement. Following Ädel’s (2010) taxonomy and conducting multimodal analyses on a dataset extracted from lectures in Social Sciences at Yale University’s OpenCourseWare, we set out to research organizational metadiscourse instances and demonstrate their multimodal use across lecturing styles and the engagement they convey.

Keywords: multimodal engagement, metadiscourse, lecturing styles, spoken academic lectures, multimodality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metadiscourse taxonomies
  • 3.Multimodal studies of lectures
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Findings and discussion
    • 5.1Quantitative exploration
    • 5.2Use of semiotic resources
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.301.17ber
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