A Study Of Reading Classroom Metadiscourse Of English Teachers In Senior High Schools

Metadiscourse is generally defined as 'discourse about discourse' or 'talk about talk'.It plays an important part in constructing discourse,expressing the speaker's views and assisting audience in understanding the propositional content.This paper attempts to study how metadiscourse is used in the EFL classroom teaching and what differences and similarities of metadiscourse are between male teachers and female teachers.This study,enlightened by Hyland's(2005)interpersonal model of metadiscourse and his division of it,is based on the corpus of six English teachers'classroom teaching.Through quantitative analyses,the result shows that interactional metadiscourse ranks the highest frequency,followed by interactive metadiscourse and textual metadiscourse.And among the eleven subcategories of metadiscourse markers,the engagement markers rank the highest frequency,followed by frame markers,transitions markers,hedges,attitude markers,self mentions,boosters,code glosses,endophoric markers,evidentials,propositional markers.Furthermore,the result also shows that the interactional metadiscourse used by male teachers is higher than female teachers from the perspective of mean,and the frequency of hedges is higher than boosters both in male teachers and female teachers.But from the perspective of P value,there is no difference in the use of metadiscourse in both male teachers and female teachers.Based on the results,the specific strategies of metadiscourse uses are given in this paper:1)taking full advantage of engagement markers to cultivate equal and negotiatory learning atmosphere;2)using frame markers and transitions appropriately to emphasize the logical relationship between words and the teaching process;3)using various attitude markers to inspire the students' initiative in study;4)using propositional markers to promote comprehensible input.