‘It sounds a little cool’

Abstract

Social media platforms such as YouTube have become increasingly popular for language teaching and learning. Despite adequate research on the use of YouTube for educational purposes, it is necessary to explore the verbal and non-verbal features YouTubers deploy, as in Taiwan, to construct online discourse in a multilingual context. Using the Appraisal Theory framework, this study analyses the evaluative practices in three Taiwan-based English-teaching videos. The results reveal that YouTubers made evaluations fairly frequently and used specific multimodal devices for evaluation in language-teaching videos, such as expressions of judgement, disclaim, and focus, and gestures such as beats and pointing. The evaluation was found to serve genre-specific functions, including explaining pedagogical content, making meta-pragmatic comments about language use, marking the opening and closing of the video, and promoting products or services. The findings have implications for research on appraisal, social media pragmatics, and online language teaching practices.