A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF BOOSTERS IN YOUTUBE LECTURES BY ESL TEACHERS IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

This study examines the application of boosters as one of the essential sub-categories of metadiscourse in academic lectures offered on YouTube by English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers in Pakistan. Boosters are language tools that are based on the metadiscourse model developed by Hyland (2005) and reveal certainty, commitment, and rhetorical conviction. Although a significant body of metadiscourse in written academic discourse research is available, one still considers spoken pedagogical genres, which are especially those disseminated with the help of digital solutions, as rather under-researched in the context of South Asian and, of course, Pakistani environments. The present corpus-based study utilizes a Corpus created for this purpose, which contains 5 recorded lectures of Pakistani ESL teachers on a variety of topics, such as philosophy of curriculum and professional growth of teachers, Islamic administration, as well as school record management. AntConc 4.2.0, a corpus analysis program that facilitated frequency, concordance, and collocational profiling of the booster items that appeared in the taxonomy of Hyland (2005), was used to analyse the corpus. Four hundred and eighteen booster tokens were found in an estimated 15,870 words. The results indicate that the most dominant functional category is epistemic certainty markers (e.g., clearly, absolutely, indeed, in fact), then there are universal quantifiers (always, never), and cognitive-mental process verbs (know, believe, demonstrate). The density of boosters was quite different over lectures and was greatest in the case of teacher professional development and curriculum lectures. The patterns proposed demonstrate that Pakistani ESL instructors use boosters in a strategic manner to enforce disciplinary power, control the engagement of the audience, and negotiate the pedagogical asymmetry of the lecture genre. This study helps to see the difference between metadiscourse in digital and spoken academic settings and provides recommendations that can be applied to ESL teacher education and the academic discourse classroom teaching in Pakistan.