| Metadiscourse is seen as an important rhetorical and pragmatic linguisticphenomenon in organizing discourse, conveying a speaker’s or writer’s personalities,attitude and social interaction. It is generally claimed as “discourse and discourse†or “talkabout talkâ€. And it exists in any genres of languages.Crismore （1989） claims any form of language communication involves twodiscourses: primary discourse and metadiscourse. Primary discourse conveys propositionalinformation and serves as ideational function of language, while metadiscourse guidesreaders to react to theme content, express their viewpoints and attitude which employs aninteractive way where readers take their stance in an unfolding text. Hyland thinks thatprimary discourse is inseparable to metadiscourse, because a text functions simultaneouslyboth expressing propositional information and signifying readers. Hyland summarizes it asa social interaction through which a writer transmits his or her identification to readers in away readers are able to accept, builds a relationship with readers, creates an effective andexpressive text.College English writing which is viewed as the weakest skill in students’ eyes hasbeen being studied by teachers and scholars. Most of studies concern with the layers of useof words and sentences. Fewer involves in the rhetoric and pragmatic aspects in students’writing in terms of metadiscourse use. Examining students’ compositions, it is found thateven if there are not any errors in the use of words, sentences and grammar, their articlesread not understandable and vague in meaning, which is characterized by mainlyknowledge—telling pattern in argument without concerning about readers existence in theprocess of reading.Following Hyland’s theoretical frameworks, the author sets up a corpus with91490words from non-English major students compositions of YanShan university tomake a contrastive analysis with the norm of ten sub-categories of metadiscourse. Theattempt to do the study are to find out:1. How is frequency of metadiscourse use in students’ composition?2. What is the characteristics of metadiscourse? 3. What are problems of metadiscourse use in students’ writing?4. What pedagogical implications are obtained from the study?The findings show that on the whole the proportion to metadiscourse use isrelatively higher (12%). Overuse, improper use and misuse of metadiscourse result in thehigher proportion. Interactive resources of metadiscourse use is more than interactionalones, which indicates students’ awareness of communication is weak. Lack of variety ofmetadiscourse use is another distinct problem. Students’ preference for transition markers(32.5%) leads to the increase in amount of interactive resources, meanwhile, the extremeout-of-balance distribution of metadiscourse. In addition, owing to the interference ofmother tongue negative transference and lack of awareness of readers, colloquial wordslike “soâ€,“butâ€,“and†take up the most in compositions.With regard to the implications,writing interactive strategies need to be familiar to students and opportunities are given forstudents to practice. In addition, instructing students in metadiscourse knowledge isnecessary. Essentially, they should be exposed to authentic reading materials. Students aretaught to search for metadiscourse items in their course book and make them be aware ofthe items which uncover features outside the text and have influence the way text iswritten. Most importantly, teachers help students be alert the existence of imaginedaudience. Teachers and students are sensitive to genre-specific and community-specificissue of audience. All in all, making students be aware of readers’ needs and expectationsis the most crucial. After all, the aim of writing is communicate between writer andreaders. |
