| With deepening research on German writing and writing teaching, more and more studies choose to focus on text structure, text style and intercultural phenomena in student compositions, offering useful suggestions for teaching writing.Linguists studying English use the term meta-discourse to name the discourse that offers self-projection, organizes language, shows the author’s attitude and interacts with the reader. This theoretical framework plays an important part in analyzing methods to teach English writing. However, it has not been applied in the research on teaching German writing. In my opinion, the meta-discourse theory can be well applied to solve some problems in German writing.This dissertation, in the theoretical part, aims at reconstructing the meta-discourse theory in German discourses by putting forward its definition, functions and classification, and then by setting up a theoretical model to analyze compositions of students of German. The empirical part of this dissertation carries out both quantitative and qualitative studies to fulfill the following four tasks:1. To describe and analyze how German majors, after the completion of basic studies, use meta-discourse devices (MDRs) in their compositions;2. To discuss the relationship between the use of MDRs and the quality of the compositions;3. To identify the problems in students’ use of MDRs and to find the causes;4. To give suggestions for teaching writing in German. In addition, five hypotheses for the study are made concerning therelationship between students’ use of MDRs and the quality of theircompositions.1. The number of MDRs used shows little difference when they are related to the argumentation structure.2. Seen in purely quantitative perspective, the use of MDRs has no significant relationship with the quality of compositions.3. Students with lower proficiency tend to use more complicated MDRs to organize their compositions.4. Students with lower proficiency tend to overuse MDRs in validity, attitude markers and remarks.5. Chinese students majoring German tend to mix their mother tongue and the target language in their writing in German.In addition to the introductory chapter, this dissertation consists of six chapters.The literature review (Chapter Two) introduces the concepts and categories of meta-discourse given by Hyland and Xu Haiming, and explains the theory of meta-discourse analysis for German language. Chapter Three reports the analysis, from the perspective of register, of structure and related meta-discourse markers in argumentative writing.For the empirical study,100 argumentative compositions were collected randomly from 10 universities. These compositions were students’writing for the PGG examination (writing task A) in 2011. They were divided into three groups according to the scores. All MDRs were identified, classified, calculated and judged according to the theory discussed in Chapter Two, thus offering a basis for quantitative study and guaranteeing the validity (Chapter Four). This dissertation used SPSS to study the correlation between the number of MDRs and the quality of those compositions, and analyzed the word length, validity, and the frequency of validity markers in compositions of different groups of students (Chapter Five). In order to answer the remained questions in the quantitative analysis and question 5, this dissertation also analyzed the use of MDRs in a qualitative method. With specific case analysis, it discussed the text-organizing MDRs and interactional MDRs used in students’compositions, and summed up some typical Chinese discourse and writing styles. Finally, the qualitative analysis tried to categorize and analyze the errors in using MDRs in German and in Chinese respectively, and put forward some hypothesis for causes of those errors.The study yields the following results:1. The use of text-organizing MDRs is closely related to text structure; therefore, students showed little difference in the frequency of using them. However, in the respect of how they used them, students with high and average proficiency could use a whole set of them properly.2. The use of interactional MDRs is influenced more by individual writing habits. Regardless of the quality of the compositions, some students used them frequently while others were not. With further analysis, the study found that students with higher proficiency could use interactional MDRs correctly to improve their writing while students with lower proficiency used them incorrectly which had a negative influence on their writing. This explains why there is a positive correlation between essay quality and quantity of interactional MDRs in compositions of students with high proficiency, and conversely, a negative correlation in compositions of students with low proficiency.3. The error analysis shows that the morphosyntactic errors are typically made in the use of text-organizing MDRs. In spite of the fact that they had learned the express patterns, students with lower proficiency could not use them properly. As for the use of interactional MDRs, students with lower proficiency preferred to convince the reader by highlighting their own conviction, which is harmful to the logic of an argument.4. Students with average and low proficiency often followed the writing styles and habits in Chinese and thus mixed Chinese with German patterns in their compositions.5. Meta-discourse and primary discourse jointly contribute to the discourse. They are quite indispensable to each other. Students should use both of them in their writing.From the above analysis, the following suggestions were made for teaching writing:1. The knowledge of text-organizing MDRs can contribute to the consciousness of students about text structure, thematic development and text coherence, but the acquisition of such knowledge is not just to memorize the MDRs.2. The interactional MDRs summarize a series of subject-based speech means that occur sporadically in German, including modal verbs and modal adverbs. The knowledge about it can help students to master the use of interactional MDRs in different contexts.3. Teachers should not only explain to students the concept of meta-discourse, but also fully understand this theory. They should be able to apply it to teaching writing in German, and analyze discourses and errors. |
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