The Relationship Between Metadiscourse And College Students' Writing Quality

This study sets out to investigate the effects of metadiscourse on writing skills for Chinese EFL learners. The focuses of the study are whether the quantity of metadiscourse devices will affect writing quality and whether the instruction of metadiscourse will influence EFL writing skills.In spite of the variety of researches on metadiscourse from descriptive and comparative perspective, few of them conducted direct and intensive investigation into the relationship between metadisourse and EFL writing quality; therefore, this thesis aims to make up for the regret and provide the original data and material by examining how the quantity of metadiscourse devices will affect EFL writing quality and how instruction of metadiscourse will influence EFL writing skills.This study addresses two questions:1. What is the relationship between the use of metadiscourse devices and the quality of writing? 2. Does the direct teaching of metadiscourse markers enhance the students' writing ability? If it does, how can it enhance writing ability?There are totally 60 first-year students in the experiments. They are science students from Shandong Institute of Light Industry. First, they were divided into two classes:one class was treated as Experimental Class (EC), and the other Control Class (CC). A pre-test showed no difference between the two classes. Students from EC received instruction on metadiscourse. Finally, a post-test was administered to compare with pre-test. Students from EC achieved higher score than those from CC.The result shows that students from EC obviously outperformed those from CC, which proves the effectiveness of the instruction of metadiscourse in classroom. Besides, according to the computing and analysis of quantity of each metadiscourse device, this result demonstrates that the quantity of metadiscourse might not determine the quality of writing.