Study On Preview Language In The Opening Part Of Undergraduates’ Essay Writing

Metadiscourse refers to discourse without propositional meaning. It was brought up by Harris and got developed in studies by Williams and Hyland. It is employed to organize discourse, arouse the readers’interest, and build connection between the writer and readers. Metadiscourse doesn’t contain actual meaning. It is like stem and root of a plant which connects flowers and leaves. Propositional discourse, which contains actual meaning, completes metadiscourse.This study utilizes two corpora. Corpus1is drawn from college student English compositions in our country which includes400essays in total.50students are English majors and50are not. They are required to hand in4essays with fixed topics. Corpus2comes from a composition book of American college students which includes different genres. This study takes16essays from this book which can be grouped into argumentations and explanatory expositions. Due to the size of corpus2, we won’t do lots of quantitative studies but some qualitative studies.This study mainly focuses on preview language in the opening part of college student essays which has been rarely studied both at home and abroad. Some researches abroad mentioned preview language and gave a brief introduction to its function, i.e. giving a hint about what is going to be discussed in the following or what the writer is going to do. But the realization of preview language in student essays of different level remains unexplored. This study mainly compares linguistic features among students of different level to bring up some suggestions to English writing instruction. Linguistic features include word frequency, general VS specific words, cataphora, first person pronoun and rhetorical questions. And preview language is divided into metadiscourse preview language and propositional preview language. Genre analysis will also be mentioned during linguistic features.400essays are classified into explanatory expositions and argumentations. Use of preview language differs a lot in two genres.Research shows that English writing in college students is highly modelized. In general, preview language use relates to language proficiency. Lower level students use more general words and offer less genuine meaning; degree of oralization differs according to language proficiency. Lower level learners use more cataphoric markers; rhetorical questions are not genuine questions and variations of statement but language units drawing readers’attention; higher level learners use more propositional preview language. So in writing writers could use more specific words which contain more information, instead of simple model language. Meanwhile teachers should offer various input thus enabling learners with more language options.