The Use Of Meta-discourse In Chinese Freshmen’s Argumentative Essays

As an important skill, writing is not only one of the ultimate goal of EFL learning, but a big trouble domestic students confront.In recent years, with metadiscourse’s arising in the field of Second Language Writing, many scholars have carried out related researches. However, due to the preference of different metadiscourse frameworks and subjects together with the lack of communication with related researches, no satisfactory answer can be given to the issue "What is the situation of metadiscourse’s usage in China’s campus freshmen’s argumentative writings " by relevant studies. To be specific, questions such as "Does there exist the possibility of missing of metadiscourse markers for no obvious and systematic metadiscourse teaching","Does there exist difference of metadiscourse usage between students of English major and non-English major, between campus freshman and higher level student and between different topics".In order to answer the questions above,100freshmen’s (including English and non-English major students) argumentative writings have been investigated. And studies of Cheng and Jiang (2004) together with Cao and Wang (2009) have been chosen to make further comparison.The data shows that China’s campus freshmen employ a greater number of metadiscourse devices even to a certain degree of excess, more interpersonal metadiscourse markers, too many commentaries together with different number of metadiscourse devices for various topics.According to the previous study, the authors suggest: improve the existing ambiguity writing instruction of metadiscourse; change the teaching ideas, focus more on writing content and the involvement of readers during writing.