Metadiscourse and Teacher Moves for Supporting Student Reasoning in Linguistics Classroom Interactions

ABSTRACT This paper examines the features of metadiscourse across different teacher moves in university linguistics classroom discourse and the teaching strategies reflected in its use. The results reveal that teachers employ diverse metadiscourse during classroom interactions to support student reasoning. This includes interactive metadiscourse to organize and guide classroom discourse and interactional metadiscourse to express attitudes and foster dialogue to encourage engagement. Teachers tend to favor specific types of metadiscourse when performing particular moves. They also have preferred ways of structuring moves into extended sequences and jointly mobilize move sequencing and metadiscourse to construct differing dialogic spaces that foster student thinking. These findings highlight strong links between metadiscourse and teacher moves, underscoring the integral role of metadiscourse in shaping effective teacher moves to support student engagement and thinking.