Multimodal discourse analysis of English language massive open online courses (MOOCS): from a rhetorical structure theory perspective

• Autores: J. Ma
• Localización: EDULEARN22 Proceedings: 14th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (July 4th-6th, 2022, Palma, Spain) / coord. por Luis Gómez Chova, Agustín López Martínez, Joanna Lees, 2022, ISBN 978-84-09-42484-9, págs. 1283-1291
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Human communication relies on language, which is multimodal in nature. In linguistics, discourse analysis (DA) plays an important role as a classic research field. The extension of DA to other semiotic resources than language, such as visual images and sound, has led to a research field known as multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). Systemic functional grammar (SFG) has been used to study multimodality in English as a foreign language classrooms. As part of analyzing rhetorical relations in multimodal discourses, RST, a theory related to SFG, has also been adopted. The instructional discourse in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have developed fast in recent years, is also multimodal in nature but has been scarcely analyzed by means of MDA.As part of this study, RST was used to analyze 12 Massive Online Open English Courses (MOOECs) in which English was the primary instructional language. The purpose of this study was to compare the rhetorical relations realized in teachers' instructional verbiage and the synergy between teachers' verbiage and non-language modes between six MOOECs accredited by the Ministry of Education of China (i.e., quality MOOECs) and six regular MOOECs. Research questions for this study were:1. What are the differences and similarities in the use of rhetorical relations in the quality and regular MOOECs?2. What are the similarities or differences in rhetorical relations in synergies of verbiage and the three non-language modes between the quality MOOECs and regular MOOECs?In this paper, we present RST structure (Stede, Taboada, & Das, 2017) and MDA structure (He, 2018; Norris, 2004; Peng, Zhang, & Chen, 2017) utilizing ELAN, rstWeb, and RSTTool for the description (Stede, Taboada, & Das, 2017). The Mann-Whitney U test and Chi-square test were mostly used to analyze data. According to the results, the distribution of rhetorical relations in verbiage was also significantly different between the two types of MOOECs. MOOECs used the following relations most frequently: Preparation, Conjunction, and Elaboration. The least used relations were Result, Restatement, and Otherwise in quality MOOECs and Otherwise, Justify and Evidence in regular MOOECs. Last but not least, significant associations between course type and the distribution of rhetorical relations realized in the synergies of V+Gestures and V+Gaze were found, but none were found for V+Fes.By comparing the rhetorical relations realized in instructional verbiage and the synergies of multimodal instructional discourse in MOOECs, this study has contributed to research on instructional discourse using MDA, and attested to the feasibility of applying RST theory in analyzing MOOECs. Implications for the development of MOOECs and for conducting multimodal discourse analysis of MOOECs in future research have also been addressed.