A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Metadiscourse In Argumentative Writings Written By Chinese And American College Students

Metadiscourse(MD)plays a very important role in interpretation and persuasion in writing discourse.Its use can help authors to express their attitudes and viewpoints and guide readers to understand discourse,and form a better interactive relationship.Previous researches on MD show that MD plays an important role in second language learning,especially in second language writing.More and more scholars pay attention MD uses in second language writing.In the existing literatures,the related researches mainly attach importance to a limited number of academic genres,such as investigation papers and textbooks.In terms of the research objects,there are relatively few comparative studies on the characteristics of MD in English argumentative writings written by Chinese and American college students.Thus,this study is needed to examine MD uses among college students from cross cultural perspectives and the results of it may have some pedagogical implications in the improvement of second language teachings and writings.Hyland’s(2005)MD mainly consists of two parts: interactive MD and interactional MD.The two parts are divided into transitions,evidentials,endophoric markers,frame markers,code glosses,hedges,boosters,attitude markers,engagement markers and self mentions.37 argumentative essays from Ten-thousandth English Compositions of Chinese Learners(the TECCL)and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(the LOCNESS)are chosen,respectively marked as Chinese College Students’ English Writing Samples(CCSEWS)and English College Students’ English Writing Samples(ECSEWS).Through the frequency,this study examines the general distribution of MD used by Chinese and American college students as well as the similarities and divergences in the perspective of the interactive MD and the interactional MD in the samples.On this basis,through the independent sample t-test,interpretations on similarities and divergences in interactive MD and interactional MD are explained.The results of this study are as follows.Firstly,the overall distribution of MD uses between Chinese students and American students are presented.In terms of interactive MD,Chinese college students and American college students use transitions,frame markers more frequently while endorphoric markers,evidentials,and code glosses less frequently.As for interactional MD,hedges and engagement markers are used frequently while boosters,attitude markers and self mentions are used less for Chinese college students.For American college students,they use much more hedges,engagement markers,boosters and self mentions but less attitude markers.Secondly,there are similarities and divergences in the use of interactive MD and interactional MD in both Chinese and American college students.In terms of interactive MD,there are no statistical significant divergences in transitions,frame markers,endophoric markers and evidentials while a statistical significant divergence appears in code glosses.In terms of interactional MD,there are no statistical significant divergences in hedges,engagement markers and attitude markers while a statistical significant divergence appears in boosters and self mentions.The similarities and divergences in MD uses of Chinese and American college students are explained.The similarities are explained from the perspective of textual coherence and genre features and interpersonal relationships.The divergences are explained from the cross-cultural point of view,which is the high context and low context theory.From the perspective of communicative responsibility belongings,China is a high context reader-responsible culture in which most of the information exists in the context or is internalized on individuals while the United States is a low context writer-responsible culture in which American college students are supposed to employ a large amount of plaintext information—code glosses to help readers capture information.Therefore,there is a significant divergence between Chinese college students and American college students in the use of code glosses.From the perspective communicative social relationship orientations,China is a high context collectivism-oriented culture that emphasizes implicit and inexact expressions while the United States belongs to a low context individualism-oriented culture that advocates expressing things in a straightforward and explicit manner.There fore,there are significant divergences between Chinese college students and American college students in the uses of the boosters and self mentions.The innovation of this study is that the divergences of MD uses in English argumentative writings written by Chinese and American students are explained from the high context and low context theory proposed by Hall(1976),with the purpose of improving the intercultural communication skills of Chinese college students.The study results are helpful to the second language teaching,especially the writing teaching.Based on the study results,some suggestions on how to teach second language English writings are put forward.Teachers are supposed to focus on the authenticity of English writing tasks to cultivate students’ awareness of target readers,teach MD knowledge to cultivate students’ meta-pragmatic awareness as well as combining writing and reading into a whole process so as to cultivate students’ textual awareness and interaction.Also,the study could provide a new exploration of MD researches to some extent.