This study investigates the use of teachers’ regulative discourse in an online academic writing course from the perspective of Bernstein’s pedagogic discourse theory. By observing and analyzing the data from the “Academic English Writing” course on the China University MOOC platform, the study examines the forms, syntactic expressions, and functions of directives used by teachers in online classes and explores their impact on teaching and student learning. The findings reveal that teachers prefer to use direct regulative discourses, such as imperative sentences while utilizing indirect and more polite discourses less frequently. The findings help to provide references for MOOC teachers to optimize their use of regulative discourse.
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