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, María Noelia Ruiz Madrid (secret.) , Christine Räisänen (voc.) This thesis explores the uses of organizational metadiscourse in lectures from a multimodal perspective. Organizational metadiscourse is a tool that is often employed in lectures to signal the directions of the lecture, to establish connections across the contents being developed, and to facilitate the comprehension of the students. However, most analyses of metadiscourse have been conducted only from a linguistic perspective. In this thesis, I argue that organizational metadiscourse is conveyed through the combination of multiple modes in multimodal ensembles. Thus, I look at metadiscourse in three different levels of analysis: a quantitative, a linguistic and a multimodal one. In this regard, my study contributes to expanding previous research on metadiscourse and offers a holistic view on its uses in lectures. Finally, I suggest that the use of organizational metadiscourse, both at a linguistic and at a non-verbal level, is influenced by the lecturing style chosen by the lecturers (conversational, rhetorical or reading styles).
The ultimate aim of this study is twofold. On the one hand, I intend to expand the knowledge of spoken academic genres by looking at organizational metadiscourse from a multimodal perspective while considering lecturing styles as a key variable that influences its use. In this sense, I am interested in exploring not only what is said (verbal metadiscourse), but also how it is said, i.e. through which particular combinations of modes. On the other hand, I aim to validate the methodology employed in this thesis that is based on the combination of quantitative, linguistic and multimodal approaches. In this line, the multimodal methodology devised in this thesis is particularly novel, as it combines concepts and tools from three multimodal frameworks (Multimodal Social Semiotics, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, and Multimodal Interaction Analysis).
Thus, the study presented in this thesis is based on the following research questions:
RQ 1. How is organizational metadiscourse used quantitatively in academic lectures? RQ 2. How is organizational metadiscourse expressed verbally? RQ 3. How is organizational metadiscourse expressed non-verbally? RQ 4. How does organizational metadiscourse contribute to the structuring process of the lectures? This thesis is structured in 9 chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 discuss some notions on discourse analysis, genre analysis, multimodality and metadiscourse, which define the theoretical framework for my research. Next, Chapter 4 considers these theoretical concepts to devise a methodology for the study of organizational metadiscourse in lectures. Then, chapters 5 to 8 describe and discuss the various analyses conducted (a quantitative analysis, a linguistic analysis, a multimodal analysis of the use of semiotic resources, and a multimodal analysis of the process in which lecturers structure speech as sequences of actions). Finally, Chapter 9 provides some conclusions, suggests pedagogical applications, and reflects upon the limitations of the study while identifying possibilities for further research.
In order to answer the research questions presented above, I have compiled a corpus of 6 full courses in Humanities (two courses per lecturing style), which are made up of 152 lectures. These lectures have been extracted from Yale University’s OpenCourseWare (a compilation of lectures and educational materials from various university courses that is available online). Two sub-corpora were then created: a corpus of six representative lectures (one per course), and a corpus of six structuring segments (one per course), i.e. sections with a high frequency of metadiscursive instances. The main corpus has served as the basis for a quantitative analysis to discuss RQ1. The sub-corpus of six representative lectures has been inspected from a linguistic perspective (RQ2) and using a Multimodal Interaction Analysis approach to look at the structuring sequences of actions performed by the lecturers (RQ4). Finally, the sub-corpus of six structuring segments has been multimodally annotated and analyzed to discern how metadiscourse is expressed from a non-verbal perspective (RQ3).
The quantitative study conducted to respond to my first research question has identified previewing and reviewing as the most recurrent categories of organizational metadiscourse in lectures. Moreover, organizational metadiscourse seems to be more frequent at the beginnings of the lectures and both at the beginnings and endings of the courses. In addition, some similarities arise within each of the lecturing styles in terms of the total amount of organizational metadiscourse employed in the lectures. This quantitative analysis has served to narrow down the scope of analysis by focusing on those recurrent and representative uses of metadiscourse.
Concerning my second research question, a series of syntactic types and subtypes have been identified as recurrent patterns in the use of organizational metadiscourse. Furthermore, some lexical choices, such as the use of communication and mental verbs, have also been spotted in a high frequency as being used to proclaim metadiscourse. Nevertheless, the differences across lecturing styles are minimal from a linguistic point of view and they come down to a higher frequency in the use of ‘we’ pronouns in reading style lectures.
Regarding my third research question, the multimodal analysis of semiotic resources reveals that, apart from the verbal mode, gestures, gaze, posture, proxemics and paralanguage are frequently used in structuring segments. Besides, metadiscourse has been found as co-occurring with several of these modes in multimodal ensembles. As for the influence of lecturing styles, the results point to a constraint of certain lecturing styles over the availability of these resources. For example, the use of some modes like gestures or gaze seems to be limited in lecturers who depend highly on their notes (especially, reading style lecturers). In this line, differences across lecturing styles are evident and this analysis contributes to defining lecturing styles in terms of the use of semiotic resources.
Finally, as for my fourth research question, the findings show how lecturers signal the organization of the lecture in sequences of actions. In this regard, key differences are found across lecturing styles: in conversational style lectures content-developing actions merge into organizational ones that serve as separating elements between topics; rhetorical style lectures are often organized in long sequences of content-developing actions that might occasionally be interrupted by organizational ones; and reading style lectures alternate reading and spontaneous actions. Finally, the exploration of the sequences of actions performed by the lecturers has revealed two main roles for metadiscourse: an active one when metadiscourse is used in the foreground to signal the direction of the lecture, establish connections, etc.; and a passive role when metadiscourse is used in the midground and serves as a verbal filler of the verbal mode.
