An Experimental Study Of Metadiscourse In Oral English Class Of Junior High School

As we know, the use of language to talk about our experiences and ideas is obviously a key purpose of communication. But how can we communicate with others successfully? The speakers need to find a useful way to improve our oral English skills and create good relationship with their audience. For a long time, there are many problems in oral English class teaching of junior high school, such as lack of adequate training in spoken English, the single classroom teaching model, lack of confidence and so on. Therefore, it’s necessary to take some appropriate measures to improve the oral English teaching in junior high school effectively.The term of metadiscourse was first proposed by Zelig Harris in 1959. It is an important part of discourse, existed in both writing and speech. As a special structure of discourse, metadiscourse can help the speakers to organize discourse, express ideas and reflect the relationship with the audience. The scholars have built different theoretical frameworks on metadiscourse from different perspectives, such as communicative, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and rhetoric perspectives. In the recent existing studies on metadiscourse, much more attention is paid to written academic discourse, leaving spoken academic discourse almost untouched.In the light of this, the study combines the theory of metadiscourse with junior high school oral English class teaching in order to investigate the impact of metadiscourse instruction on students’ oral performance. Based on Hyland(2005)’s theory model on metadiscourse, this study designs teaching control experiments by using three instruments, namely, testing, questionnaires and interviews and selects two parallel classes from Grade Eight in Wang Shi Middle School, one class as the experimental group and the other class as the control group. After 12 weeks experiment of metadiscourse teaching, all the data will be collected and analyzed in SPSS18.0 and Excel 2007. The study comes to the main findings. Firstly, students’ oral English interest has been improved after they were explicitly taught the basic knowledge of metadiscourse. Secondly, the instruction of metadiscourse could be used as a useful approach in oral English class teaching for junior high students. Thus, the teaching of metadiscourse results in changes of its use in oral English performance.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one describes the background, the significance of the study, and then proposes three research questions and the organization of the thesis. Chapter Two first reviews the previous exiting studies on discourse markers and then summarizes the theory of metadiscourse, namely, the definitions, classifications of metadiscourse. After that, by looking back the studies of metadiscourse in written texts and spoken texts, the researcher puts forward the necessity of integrating metadiscourse theory into oral English teaching. Chapter Three introduces the application of metadiscourse to oral English class teaching and presents the research methodology, that is to say, the research questions, subjects, instruments and the data collection and analysis. Chapter Four concentrates on data analysis and discussions of the three research questions. Chapter five is conclusion, in which the researcher concludes the major research findings, put forwards the implications as well as the limitations and suggestions for future studies on metadiscourse.