Moves and linguistic features analysis of online course previews: a comparative study of institution and private based discourses

Understanding discursive practices of promotional discourse communities can shed light on a new aspect of genre-based investigations. This study thus aims to comparatively examine prepared spoken discourse genre of new promotional text which found 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 of both private tutors and lecturers from well-known universities. The corpora consisted of 28,631 words in total, compiled through 20 pieces of the top five online course previews within the two sub-categories including Business and Education. The data were analyzed with both manual and the supported AntConc (Version 3.5.8). Both of Bhatia’s (1993, 2004) move models were initially selected as the promotional seminal frameworks for the main subject area of this study. Nonetheless, neither of Bhatia’s models can be entirely adopted to illustrate all of the features of the moves and steps of the target data of this research. Neither of them can be fully employed to examine all of the move features of the target online course previews, which contained the nature of both informative and promotional discourses. Hence, the researcher’ new developed a move framework based on an initial stage of pilot study.The results of the move status analysis based on Xiao and Cao’s (2013) and revised version by Thumvichit (2018)’ study of Business correspondence as hybrid text, their cut-off point was applied in this research. The results from both corpora revealed that there were three obligatory moves in the Business and Education of Udemy and EdX corpora which were Move2: Indicating the objectives or expected outcome of the course, Move3: Giving an outline or the focus of the course and Move 8: Enticing individuals to join the course. This implied that Move2, Move3 and Move8 were regarded as more important moves than the others of both corpora. For Education EdX corpus, there was only one conventional move which was Move1B: Pointing out the gap of knowledge, and four optional moves : Move 4: Describing the unique instructional approach, Move5: Establishing credentials and Move7: Reassuring/restating the value of the course. In Education Udemy corpus, Move 1: Providing the rationale of the course, Move 4 : Describing the unique instructional approach and Move7: Reassuring/restating the value of the course were regarded as optional move. To compare Business sub category of EdX and Udemy corpora, it was found that Business EdX contained more than double the amount of conventional moves those in Business Udemy corpus. Interestingly, Move 5A occurrence of Udemy: Referring to the instructors’ qualifications was deemed as the obligatory move, whereas this move was regarded as optional move in the EdX corpus. The findings from the linguistic features at of word, phrase and clause levels showed both similarities and differences between the two datasets in every move of both corpora. The results of both Business and Education of EdX corpus demonstrated the preference of verb classes, noun classes, modal verb, and If-clause in certain moves. However, the results of Udemy corpus indicated the high frequent use of evaluative adjectives, intensifiers, verb classes, If-clause and Imperative form in almost every move. Besides, pronoun, prepositional phrases, and rhetorical questions were highly employed in both corpora. In addition, the findings from the linguistic features at the particular context within each corpus with their sub-categories also marked the differences of the nature of language use between the two corpora in almost every move. The results additionally exhibited that evaluative adjectives, verb classes, intensifiers and if- clause were the prominent choices of the instructors of Business and Education of Udemy corpus whereas classes and noun classes which contained various sub- categories in terms of pragmatic meaning were the salient linguistic features in EdX corpus.To elaborate more, the online course previews highlighted the fact that both platforms of university and private institution tried to be recognized to the target learners with promotional effects through the use of speech organization and linguistic features. The findings have illustrated how instructors from Business and Education of both EdX and Udemy platforms utilized key linguistic features and language patterns to enhance their positive image of their courses toward the online platforms. The results showed that the instructors of both online platforms employed the promotional strategies based on their typical styles in making use of the linguistic features in promoting their courses and repositioned themselves to compete in the current academic scenario in the international arena. Implications of the present study in relation to the promotional hybrid discourse genre analysis in education practice were also discussed in relation to how to apply into pedagogical area.