Metadiscourse is an important rhetorical resource in academic genres （Hyland， 2005; Mauranen， 1993b）. This monograph attempts to fill the gap of metadiscourse research in spoken academic genres by comparing the classroom metadiscourse used by native English speaking EAP teachers in the UK artd non-native English-speaking EAP teachers in China. Specifically， the current research primarily compared the frequencies and distributions of metadiscourse markers across the two groups of teachers and discussed potential reasons for their similarities and variations.
This research is based on a self-compiled corpus， which is divided into two subcorpora， representing the native and non-native EAP teachers' classroom discourse respectively， The data were collected from sixteen video recordings of eight teachers' classroom teaching. with four from each cultural context. By integrating a corpus-linguistic approach into Hyland's （2005） interpersonal model of metadiscourse， the present study demonstrated considerable similarities and differences of metadiscourse markers used by the two teacher groups. The concepts of discourse community and speech community were employed to explain their general commonalities and discrepancies. Possible reasons such as class size， cultural conventions， cross-linguistic transfer， linguistic repertoire and development order of acquisition， were also discussed for their variations in specific metadiscourse devices. The present study may enrich existing Metadiscourse research in spoken academic genres. It may also serve as the first step in raising teachers' classroom Ianguage awareness and involving language proficiency training in teacher education programmes.
