A corpus-assisted genre analysis of the Tunisian Lecture Corpus : focus on metadiscourse

Metadiscourse is a significant feature of texts in different genres. It enables the text producer to effectively manage his/her discourse and, in turn, it guides the audience through its content, so that they can form a coherent picture of its structure. Metadiscourse is even more important in the case of pedagogic genres in general, and the academic lecture in particular. In this thesis, metadiscourse is analyzed in terms of five criteria: non-propositional meaning, context-dependency, explicitness, intersubjectivity, and intra-textuality; and in terms of three dimensions: interactive, interactional, and bi-dimensional. The new interpersonal model presented largely draws on Hyland’s (2005a) and Ädel’s (2006) conceptualizations of metadiscourse. Along these lines, this exploratory study investigates the metadiscourse strategies used by Tunisian lecturers when teaching to English majors. It concentrates on the verbal and non-verbal realizations of those strategies, the issues related to their use, as well as their interpersonal dimensions. This study also assesses the interactivity level of the lectures using the new interpersonal model. To this aim, the Tunisian Lecture Corpus (TLC) was collected, transcribed, and coded. The approach adopted was both bottom-up (viz., data-driven) and top-down (viz., function-to-form oriented). Based on an integrated model of genre analysis, a corpus-driven study was initially set and led to the development of a corpus-based study focusing on metadiscourse. The results obtained confirm the complex nature of metadiscourse and set the notions of ‘prototypicality’ and ‘continuum’ as the main principles along which we can understand the way metadiscourse is used in different contexts. The study also reveals how metadiscourse constitutes an effective tool for describing the rhetorical and linguistic features of a genre, and for gaining insights into the characteristics of a discourse community in a particular context. Pedagogical implications and applications related to both the lecturers’ professional training and the development of an academic listening and speaking course for the students are also discussed.