Verbal engagement strategies in Iranian Teachers’ talk: Instagram teaching context

Abstract

This study explores the verbal engagement strategies that EFL instructors adopt when teaching English over Instagram. These instructors create videos where they teach English and share them on Instagram. Twenty-five highly engaging English teaching videos on Instagram were used as the data of this study. To discover the engagement strategies that the instructors used, a combination of Hyland’s Engagement Model and Martin and White’s Appraisal Model, was applied to the teachers’ talk. The results indicated a slight difference in the frequency of engagement resources between the two models. Moreover, the results related to Hyland’s framework revealed that listener pronouns (second person pronouns) had considerably higher frequency than other engagement devices in the instructors’ speech. Nevertheless, personal aside and appeals to shared knowledge were used to a limited extent. Regarding the model of Martin and White, the result indicated that the overall engagement resources of heterogloss were about twice those of the monogloss. Moreover, between two broad categories of heterogloss, the resources of the contract category were significantly more common than those of the expand category in the teachers’ talk. The findings of this study have fruitful pedagogical implications. As the results suggest, teachers can bring the learners to discourse using listener pronouns, and in this way increase learner engagement in lessons. Moreover, the heterogloss resources, specifically the contract ones, can assist teachers in engaging learners.