An Experimental Study On Metadiscourse Awareness In The English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading plays an important role in texts.Mastering the skills and methods of English reading is very important for learners.The purpose of reading is to get students to get useful information from texts.The term metadiscourse was coined by Zellig Harris in 1959 to represent writer's or speaker's attempts to guide a receiver's perception of a text.Language is always a consequence of interaction,of the differences between people which are expressed verbally,and metadiscourse options are the ways we articulate and construct these interactions(Hyland,2008).The effect of application of metadiscourse awareness on English reading comprehension is mainly reflected by metadiscourse markers.The researches of at home and abroad focus on theory,at the same time,the empirical researches emphasize writing;the studies of reading comprehension are scare.This study aims to reveal the effect of application of metadiscourse awareness on the improvement of reading proficiency of EFL learners in senior high school.The research intends to solve the following three questions:(1)Can the application of metadiscourse awareness in reading class improve students' reading proficiency?(2)What are the effects of metadiscourse awareness on students of different English reading levels?(3)Can the application of metadiscourse awareness in reading English class enhance students' reading interest effectively?To resolve above three questions,the author chose two intact classes with 102 students in grade 1 in senior high school from Qixian County,Kaifeng City participated in the experiment.To ensure that there is no difference between the two classes in reading comprehension,the two groups were supplied with pre-test of reading comprehension.Next the experimental group with fifty students was exposed to teaching of metadiscourse markers for eight weeks.The control group received normal teaching with no specific metadiscourse teaching.Finally,both groups were given a post-test to measure their reading ability.All the data gathered from pre-test and post-test were edited into a computer and analyzed by SPSS 20.0.Independent-samples t-test,paired-samples t-test were applied to analyze the data of the experiment.Then all the subjects in EG were asked to do pre-questionnaire in the first week and post-questionnaire in the seventh week which were used to investigate the effect of application of metadiscourse awareness on students' reading interest.The results of the study are as follows: 1)the application of metadiscourse awareness did improve EFL learners' reading comprehension ability.The application of metadiscourse awareness could be easily understood by students.They could apply it into their reading processes and help them work out the information from the reading materials;2)as for different English levels,their results were not same.Students with intermediate and low levels improved more obviously than the subjects with high reading proficiency level;3)students can identify and use metadiscourse markers to grasp the logical relationship between sentences,paragraphs and chapters,better understand the structure of the article,and make reading more effective,thus,it can enhance students' English reading interest effectively.These findings have some implications for language teachers and course developers.As for language teachers,teachers should try raising learners' metadiscourse awareness and help them become better readers and more insightful writers.It could be used as a measure to improve students' reading proficiency,and the teaching of metadiscourse awareness should be integrated with the normal teaching steps and materials.Moreover,for course developers,they should try developing suitable texts that contain metadiscourse markers for learners of various reading proficiency levels to enhance EFL learners' ability to understand and remember information.