A Corpus Analysis of Engagement Markers in Facebook Status Updates: Exploring Age and Gender Effects

There has been an increasing interest in the way authors address the presence of their readers over the past few years. One of the most popular social networking sites nowadays is Facebook where millions of users have found a suitable platform to sketch their personal experiences; present their own perspectives, comments, and reflections; and express their own feelings. The theoretical and analytical framework for this study is Hyland’s (2005a,b) Model of Interaction which was originally proposed for academic texts. The present study involves extending the application of this model to online Facebook interactions. The freeware corpus analytic toolkit AntConc (version 3.5.8) is used for concordancing and posts’ analysis. This study investigates the use of engagement markers in 1500 Facebook status updates written in English by 200 Egyptian male and female students as well as Egyptian male and female academic staff. It examines how gender and age variables may affect the expression of engagement in the Facebook interactions under study. The results reveal weak age and gender distinctions with regard to the type and frequency of the engagement features under study.