Moves And Linguistic Features Analysis of Online Course Previews: A Comparative Study of Institution and Private Based Discourses

Abstract

Understanding discursive practices of promotional discourse communities can shed light on a new aspect of genre-based investigations. This comparative study thus aims to examine the prepared spoken discourse genre of new promotional text in the online course previews extracted from EdX (University platform) and Udemy (Private institutional platform). They are regarded as the largest international online learning website for private tutors and lecturers from well-known universities. The corpora comprise 28,631 words, compiled through 20 pieces of the top five online course previews within the two sub-genres, including Business and Education. The data were analyzed with both manual and the supported Antconc (Version 3.5.8). The results showed marked organizational moves and linguistic features in the new promotional speech texts that displayed a combination of promotional and academic properties. Their unique rhetorical organization in terms of employing the obligatory move structures–detailing the objectives of the course, establishing credentials, indicating the outline content of the course, and enticing the customers to join the course–was extensively found. The findings from the linguistic features at both semantic and syntactic levels showed similarities and differences between the two datasets in every move of both corpora. The results of both genres of EdX corpus demonstrated the preference for semantics of verbs, semantics of nouns, modal verbs, and If-clause in certain moves. However, the results of the Udemy corpus indicated the frequent use of evaluative adjectives, intensifiers, semantics of verbs, If-clause, and Imperative form in almost every move. The online course previews highlight that university and private institution platforms try to be recognized by the target learners with promotional effects by applying speech organization and linguistic features.