| Practical writing is an essential part of EFL writing instruction and testing in senior high schools due to its practical purposes.For the realisation of practical writing purposes,learners’ ability to communicate successfully with readers in English is of great importance.Unfortunately,interpersonal incompetence is a severe constraint on senior high school learners’ performance in practical writing.Metadiscourse refers to the linguistic resources used to organise discourse in a reader-friendly way and foster the interactions between writers and readers.With its interpersonal nature,metadiscourse can be used as an important means to tackle the serious problem of interpersonal incompetence on the part of senior high school learners in practical writing.Research on metadiscourse in student writing has received considerable scholarly attention.However,learners at the secondary level and other genres,especially practical writing,are under-investigated.In view of the above research background,the present study aims to explore senior high school learners’ performance and reflection on using metadiscourse in practical writing by answering the following three specific research questions:(1)What are the quantitative and qualitative tendencies towards the use of metadiscourse among senior high school learners in practical writing?(2)What are the quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of metadiscourse among senior high school learners at different proficiency levels in practical writing?(3)What contributes to learners’ these tendencies and differences?Through examining a total of 313 participants’ practical writing essays with reference to Hyland’s(2005)interpersonal model of metadiscourse using a corpus-based approach and analysing the empirical data from the interviews with 6 participants,the following major findings were obtained:(1)Senior high school learners tended to use more interactional resources than interactive resources in practical writing,including their preference for engagement markers and self-mentions.They were prone to commit cohesion errors,coherence errors and overuse errors.(2)As proficiency levels went down,significantly fewer endophoric markers and more self-mentions were used by senior high school learners in practical writing,and the range of endophoric markers and engagement markers narrowed down significantly.No significant qualitative differences were found across proficiency levels.(3)The quantitative tendencies could be attributed to the external factors of genres and writing topics and the internal factor of limited language proficiency.With respect to qualitative tendencies,overuse errors were caused by limited metadiscoursal resources at hand.The wrong positioning of readers and the deficiency of metadiscourse connotations led to cohesion errors and coherence errors.As for intergroup heterogeneity,the change patterns of more tokens of endophoric markers and more types of endophoric markers and engagement markers with elevated proficiency levels can be explained by developmental factors.And the reason why more proficient writers used fewer self-mentions than less proficient writers was that they prefer an impersonal style.These findings have the following pedagogical implications:(1)Senior high school learners’ quantitative and qualitative tendencies towards metadiscourse in practical writing can help EFL teachers determine important and difficult points for teaching metadiscourse.(2)EFL learners should explore how metadiscourse is used in different genres through corpus-based genre analysis.(3)EFL teachers should teach alternative approaches to metadiscourse.(4)Role-reversal peer review training should be used to enhance learners’ audience awareness.(5)EFL teachers should provide differentiating instruction on metadiscourse and avoid using a monolithic criterion for assessing metadiscourse markers in student writing. |
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