A Study Of The Effects Of Teaching Metadiscourse On Reading Comprehension

Metadiscourse, a relatively new concept in the field of discourse analysis, has attracted an increasing amount of attention. Despite the wide range of studies by both foreign and domestic researchers, the effects of teaching metadiscourse on Chinese learners'reading comprehension are not yet studied. This paper is an experimental study of teaching metadiscourse in Chinese EFL reading class, with a purpose of narrowing the research gap.The subjects are two parallel classes from Jilin University, who share the same English teacher, the same teaching material and the same schedule for English classes– four periods each week. One class (with 46 students) serves as the experimental group and the other (with 34 students) as the control group. The research mainly follows the communicative approach adopted in Cheng (1997) and a model of four steps is carried out to teach metadiscourse to the subjects in the experiment group: comparative readings between a trimmed-down version and the original version; classroom discussion; a lecture on metadiscourse: its definition, functions and types; and regular exercises and classroom discussions. Both classes are given a pretest before the experiment and a posttest after the experiment. Scores of both tests are analyzed with the help of SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science). After the experiment, the author also distributes questionnaires to the experimental group to collect data about the effects of teaching metadiscourse.The data collected from the pretest and the posttest as well as the questionnaire proves that the instruction in metadiscourse helps to improve non-English majors'reading comprehension. Based on the research, the author offers several suggestions for later researchers: more comparative readings; classroom discussion should get more students involved; the lecture on metadiscourse should be designed more elegantly.