Comparative Study Of Metadiscourse In Sino-American Undergraduate Students' English Writings

Writing is a basic linguistic competence that every EFL student should grasp.Metadiscourse(MD),as a relatively new concept in discourse analysis,is crucial to the quality of a written product.Metadiscourse refers to multifunctional linguistic features that the writer uses in a text to organize content,signal attitudes,facilitate communication,establish relationship and increase readability.Given the importance of metadiscourse in creating a coherent and effective discourse,some studies have been done to investigate the metadiscourse use in discourse.However,most previous studies interest in the metsdiscourse use in academic research articles.Less attention is given to students' writings.Besides,few studies seek to find out the comparative results of metadiscourse use among students with different native language backgrounds,let alone the comparative study of metadiscourse use between Chinese and American students in their English writings.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct a study to investigate how similar or different Chinese and American students are in the use of metadiscourse in their writings.To meet this need,a study is designed.In this study,a corpus comprising 80 students'writings is analyzed electronically and manually,among which 40 are written by Chinese undergraduate students(Corpus-C)and 40 are written by American undergraduate students(Corpus-A).This study aims to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the similarities in the use of metadiscourse between Chinese and American undergraduate students' writings?(2)Are there statistically significant differences in the frequency of metadiscourse between Chinese and American undergraduate students' writings?The findings of the study suggest that(1)there are similarities in metadiscourse use between Chinese and American undergraduate students' writings.First,metadiscourse resources are used quite frequently in both sub-corpora.Second,the frequency of interactive resources is lower than that of interactional ones in both sub-corpora.Third,within the interactive resources,transition markers constitute the most frequently used sub-category in both sub-corpora.Fourth,the sub-category of interactional resources with the highest frequency is attitude markers in both sub-corpora.(2)There are statistically significant differences in metadisocurse use between Chinese and American undergraduate students' writings.First,there is significant difference in total number of interactive metadiscourse resources between two sub-corpora.Second,the transition markers appear in Corpus-A are much more than those appear in Corpus-C.Third,Corpus-C displays a significantly higher rate of inclusion of engagement markers than Corpus-A.Possible causes for the present findings are discussed.The thesis concludes with some implications for second language(L2)writing instruction.