Abstract:

Over the last 18 months, the educational landscape has evolved significantly to embrace online/distance learning on an unprecedented scale, with the Higher Education System in Russia affected to a similar extent. While the system has had to more extensively include the available high-quality online teaching materials (in our research - lectures at massive open online courses, or MOOC lectures) in the curriculum, there has emerged a need to carry out their linguistic analysis – apart from assessing their instructional quality and relevance - for the benefit of local students and faculty. Understanding the linguistic peculiarities of MOOC lectures will contribute to the higher efficiency of language training for those who have opted for the academic path (postgraduate degree programs).

The article lays the theoretical foundation for studying this genre of academic discourse with emphasis on pragmatics, communication strategies, and stylistic features of MOOC lectures. The transcripts of lectures were analysed with the help of discourse analysis and descriptive methods.

The research reveals that conceptually and functionally MOOC-lectures approximate other types of lectures while stylistically they are typified by the speaker’s predisposition towards syntactic simplicity, the blend of formal and colloquial vocabulary, the multichannel nature of communicating the message, the extensive use of modality, a repertoire of ways of using personal pronouns to vary the degree of proximity, which is to some extent caused by the virtual nature of the addressee.

Overall, we conclude that a MOOC-lecture has inherited a range of features from a traditional one but has been developing a language identity of its own.

Keywords:

Academic discourse, online academic discourse, Massive Open Online Courses, pragmatics, e-lecture, communication strategies.