| Discourse can be mainly divided into two parts: primary discourse and metadiscourse.Primary discourse directly transmits the thematic information,describes the events and expresses the ideas.While metadiscourse refers to some words,phrases,sentences or even punctuation marks,which are used to organize,connect and regulate the primary discourse without adding any new information to the original discourse.On the one hand,it facilitates the organization of the discourse and reflects the writers or speakers' intentions and ideas.On the other hand,it indirectly makes the readers or listeners understand the discourse and accept the standpoints of the information givers.As metadiscourse plays an important role in achieving the interpersonal and textual function,it is mainly used to do textual analysis at first on the basis of systemic-functional grammar.Gradually,its impact on language teaching is noticed.As Hyland(2005)proposed,through teaching metadiscourse features,students can: understand the writers' intentions and comprehend the discourse more easily;express the viewpoints more clearly;interact with the readers more effectively,etc.So there are a growing number of investigators to involve metadiscourse in the educational field.120 students in Hebei Luancheng High School are randomly chosen to be the subjects of this experimental study.The research questions are as follows.(1)Whether explicit teaching of metadiscourse markers will improve the argumentative writing performance of students in senior high school?(2)Whether explicit teaching of metadiscourse markers has different effects on students at the high,intermediate and low writing level?To find out the answer,the research subjects' compositions in the pre-test are analyzed first to ensure they are at nearly the same level.Besides,students in the experimental class are classified into three groups: students at the high,intermediate and low writing level according to the results.Second,the author teaches metadiscourse markers explicitly to the experimental class,mainly based on the researches conducted by Osama Hassanein Sayed Hassanein(2016)and the principles and strategies proposed by Hyland(2005).However,the control class doesn't receive any knowledge about metadiscourse at all.Third,the compositions of two classes are compared with each other in two ways after the post-test.One is the distribution of metadiscourse markers and the other is the writing performance.At the same time,the writing performance of each level during the two tests is compared to explore the different effects of metadiscourse markers' teaching.As a supplement,the interview is carried out.All thequantitative and qualitative data are processed by SPSS 19.0 and Excel 2007.Major findings are listed below:Firstly,explicit teaching of metadiscourse markers can improve the argumentative writing performance of students in senior high school.Secondly,the impact of it on different students is not the same all the time.Students at the intermediate level benefit most and those who do best in argumentative writing are affected least.Besides,the author also finds that students use more metadiscourse markers than before,except for attitude markers and self mentions due to the more proper use of them.What is more,they utilize metadiscourse markers more variously and keep interactive and interactional markers in balance in their writing after the experiment.This study also gives some implications for teachers and students.In terms of teachers,it is necessary to gain the knowledge about metadiscourse.Besides,they ought to analyze passages based on the theory of metadiscourse when teaching new lessons.As for students,they should accumulate metadiscourse markers and apply the metadiscourse awareness to listening,speaking and reading,too.It is expected that the present study is able to supplement the previous studies and has some enlightenment for future studies. |
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