Innovation in Language Learning
Stance and Engagement Markers in Social Media: A Discourse Analysis of Twitter Posts on Climate Change
Bushra Ni'ma Rashid, Al-Iraqia University, College of Arts, Department of English Language (Iraq)
Bushra Saadoon Mohammed Alnoori, Al-Mansour University College, Department of English (Iraq)
Abstract
The topic of climate change communication on the X platform (formerly Twitter) has been gaining increasing scholarly attention; however, comparative studies of stance and engagement markers employed by different categories of climate communicators are still scarce. The aim of this study is to analyze stance and engagement markers in climate-change tweets from scientists, organizations and politicians. The study aims to find out what kinds of metadiscourse the climate communicators in question use, to describe what these markers do, and to compare their use in the three groups of communicators. The study is grounded on the following three hypotheses. First, boosters and attitude markers will be more frequent than hedges; second, reader pronouns and directives will be the main engagement markers; third, scientists and organizations will hedge more than politicians do. A qualitative analysis of five purposively selected tweets posted between 2024 and 2025 is carried out using Hyland’s (2005) classification of metadiscourse with the addition of frequency counts. The results mainly support the first two hypotheses, indicating the prevalence of boosters, attitude markers, reader pronouns and directives. The third hypothesis, however, is confirmed only in part; individual scientists sometimes use advocacy discourse similar to that of politicians. Climate communicators favor assertive stance and engagement of their audiences over hedges. However, the findings are based only on five tweets from the X platform.
Keywords: stance markers, engagement markers, metadiscourse, climate change communication, X platform discourse, social media analysis
