INTERACTIONAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF MALAYSIAN AND SOUTH KOREAN NEWSPAPER ARTICLES ON ONLINE LEARNING DURING COVID-19

Abstract

Metadiscourse has been broadly studied in genres such as academic papers, textbooks, essay and speeches. In contrast, little attention has been given on the study of metadiscourse on online newspapers, and the research has been primarily unexplored. The objective of this study is to identify the interactional resources used by a Malaysian and a South Korean authors in their online newspaper articles. Interactional resources are commonly used in news writing as its elements focus on engaging and interacting with the readers. The instrument used to examine the interactional resources in the two articles retrieved from News Straits Time (Malaysia) and Hankyoreh (South Korea) is Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse. Based on the findings of the study, the usage of the self-mentions’ element was absent in both articles. However, the usage of the other interactional resources such as hedges, boosters, engagement makers and attitude makers were fairly distributed throughout both articles. This is because the authors aimed to be informative on the situation of the topic; thus, they did not include their personal takes in the articles. This study also revealed that the South Korean author used more interactional resources compared to the Malaysian author. The results and findings of this study may contribute to the necessary knowledge for authors in exploring the usage of interactional resources in online newspapers. Article visualizations: