Dr. Mahboubeh Taghizadeh & Shadi Heidarpour
Iran University of Science and Technology, Iran
This study aimed at investigating the impact of metadiscourse instruction, based on the classification proposed by Hyland (2000), on the writing performance of three groups of EFL learners (i.e., pre-intermediate, intermediate, and upper-intermediate). The participants (N=90) were female learners studying English at the Kish English language institute. In this study, two instruments were used. To investigate if the learners had knowledge about the correct application of metadicourse markers in their writing, a pretest of essay writing was administered. The second instrument, the posttest, was also a writing task administered at the end of the four week instruction in order to find if metadiscourse instruction had any impact on the learners’ posttest of writing. In order to operationalize the treatment, a handout of writing including instruction on the different categories of metadiscourse elements along with a number of essay samples and cloze tests were offered to the learners. The results of paired samples t-tests revealed that instruction on metadiscourse markers was effective in enhancing the writing score of the experimental groups at the pre-intermediate, intermediate, and upper-intermediate levels. The interaction effect between group and levels of language proficiency was statistically significant. There was a significant main effect for the levels of language proficiency but no significant main effect for the group. The findings revealed that there was a difference in the writing scores of learners at the different proficiency level after receiving instruction on the metadiscourse markers, but the experimental and control groups did not significantly differ in their writing scores.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 2-3 February 2017, Ahwaz.
