Research On The Writing Samples Of CET-4 From The Perspective Of Metadiscourse

In recent years, the passing rate of CET-4 and CET-6 has obviously increased, but writing as an advanced model of output is still students’ weak part in examinations and practices. Since last century lots of scholars have done many researches on how to improve students’ writing ability. Most of them paid more attention to the specific language skills such as the correct use of grammar and vocabulary in writing while they neglected that writing is an inherent communication between writers and readers.Language is a tool used for human communication. There are two levels of discourse in any form of language—the primary discourse level and the metadicourse level. The primary discourse level consists of propositional meanings. The metadicourse level, which does not add any content to the propositional meanings, can help readers organize, interpret and evaluate propositional information provided by primary discourse. Metadiscourse is a kind of linguistic material in texts. Metadiscourse is concerned with the non-propositional content of the discourse, and academia once put it to the back seat. Recently, researchers both at home and abroad have done further researches on the functions of metadiscourse. They found that metadiscourse not only supports the propositional content of discourse but also is an effective device to enhance the readability and persuasiveness of the propositional content. It plays an important role in the organization of discourse, the delivery of the writer’s attitude towards the discourse and the interaction between writers and readers.Based on Hyland and Tse’s interpersonal model of metadisocurse, this paper, taking 80 writing samples of College English Test Band 4(CET-4) from January 2000 to December 2009 as research material, adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore the use of metadiscourse markers in writing. The research analyzes the use of metadiscourse in writing from three perspectives: the relation between the use of metadiscourse markers and writing levels, the appropriately used metadiscourse markers, and the inappropriately used metadiscourse markers.The research results show that there is a positive correlation between writing levels and the quantity of metadiscourse markers, interactive resources, and transitions; the frequency of transitions, self mentions and engagement markers is much higher than that of others; the inappropriately used metadiscourse markers mainly distributes in transitions, code glosses, boosters and engagement markers; there is a significantly negative correlation between the inappropriately used metadiscourse markers and writing levels. Main reasons for the improper use of metadiscourse markers are as follows: differences between Chinese culture and Western culture, different language systems of Chinese and English, negative transfer of the mother tongue, students’ weak English grammar foundation and teacher’s improper teaching approaches. This paper puts forward the advices of improving students’ ability in the proper use of metadiscourse markers, hoping to guide English writing teaching.