Establishing a Three-Dimension Model of Metadiscourse Taxonomy Based on Global Virtual Team’s Internal Communication ()
ABSTRACT
As COVID-19 epidemic is rampant over the globe, a large amount of enterprises
turn to the virtual team to sustain business operations. Among them, international
enterprises’ business
communication and management rely on global virtual teams (GVT) whose members
are in different time zones and locations, with different nationalities,
cultures and languages, who communicate, manage and operate through the
Internet. Based on video conferences of a multinational IT company’s GVT, this
study explores how GVT members use metadiscourse strategies to bridge cultural
differences, business English as lingua franca (BELF) proficiency gap and unstable internet traffic
to achieve effective communication. The findings suggest that 1) metadiscourse
use of GVT can be divided into three dimensions: relational metadiscourse,
textual metadiscourse and BELF-facilitating metadiscourse; 2) to bridge cultural
differences, relational metadiscourses that realize the function of “negotiating
status distance” and “clarifying speaker’s standpoint” help moderate divide in
cultural perceptions towards power distance and face management; 3) to cope with BELF
proficiency gap, BELF-facilitating metadiscourses of “repetition”, “self repair” and “co-construction
of meaning” are the most commonly used and realize the function of enhancing
intelligibility of BELF speakers’ utterance; 4) in response to the Internet-mediated communication
barriers, textual metadiscourses of “turn-manipulator” manipulate the number
and length of speech turn to ensure the coherence and accuracy of information
transmission.
Share and Cite:
Yue, S. (2020) Establishing a Three-Dimension Model of Metadiscourse Taxonomy Based on Global Virtual Team’s Internal Communication.
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
8, 400-416. doi:
10.4236/jss.2020.812032.
Cited by
No relevant information.