The Application Of Metadiscourse In College English Reading Teaching

Reading is one of the methods for people to obtain information. It plays an important role in second language acquisition. The latest College English Curriculum Requirement states that to help students'have a relative high reading ability is one of our purposes. Metadiscourse has been considered as various language devices that assist to organize the discourse and reveal the author's attitude toward the text and the audience. With the development of metadiscourse, it gains a growing attention among many linguists and language teachers. It also has been utilized in language learning. However, the studies of metadiscourse and practical language teaching are mainly focused on the relationship between metadiscourse and writing. The studies on metadiscourse and reading comprehension are not much. The research into the application of metadiscourse in English reading teaching can be scantly found. The present study is a combination of metadiscourse and English reading teaching of non-English majors. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect of explicit instruction in metadiscourse on students'reading ability and whether the effects on students with different reading proficiency levels are the same or not.The subjects of the present study are selected from Fenyang College, Shanxi Medical University. The total number of the whole subjects is 138. The experimental group has 70 subjects and the control group has 68 subjects. The experiment lasts twelve weeks. The instruction in metadiscourse is only presented in the EG. Except the instruction in metadiscourse, the subjects in the EG and CG with the same English teacher received the same teaching steps and teaching materials. According to the scores in pre-tests, all the subjects have little knowledge of metadiscourse and their reading proficiency levels have no significant difference at the beginning of the experiment. With the help of quartiles provided by SPSS 17.0, the subjects in EG are divided into three groups with different reading proficiency levels: low, intermediate and high reading proficiency level. At the end of the experiment, all the subjects attend post-test on reading comprehension to examine the subjects'reading ability after the experiment. All the data gathered from pre-test and post-test are edited into computer and analyzed by SPSS 17.0. Independent-samples t-test, paired-samples t-test and One-way ANOVA are applied to analyze the data of the experiment. Then all the subjects in EG are asked to do a questionnaire which is used to investigate the effect of instruction in metadiscourse on students and on students with different reading proficiency levels.The results of the present study have showed that the instruction in metadiscourse can enhance students'reading ability. However, the effects on students with different reading proficiency levels are different. The subjects with low and intermediate reading proficiency levels have improved their reading ability significantly. The subjects with low reading proficiency level have a higher enhancement. The subjects with high reading proficiency level also improve their reading ability, but the improvement is not significant. In a word, it is proved that metadiscourse can be accepted by students and be applied into normal English reading teaching. It can really improve students'reading ability.