Abstract
Metadiscourse, known as discourse about ongoing discourse, has been the subject of discourse research from a wide range of perspectives. In academic contexts, knowledge of metadiscourse as a prominent feature of all types of academic discourse provides second language readers with information about writer’s attitudes towards the text and the readers. Over the past decade there has been a growing interest in conducting studies investigating different aspects of metadiscourse in relation to language learning. The present study hopes to contribute to the study of metadiscourse by investigating its effect on EFL learners’ reading comprehension (with three levels of reading proficiency: low, medium, and high) when faced two text types –academic and general. To this end, data were collected through two instruments, namely a TOEFL reading comprehension sample test and a reading comprehension test which consisted of two text types was developed for the purpose of this study. Two versions of this reading comprehension test were developed: one with metadiscourse enriched texts and the other with metadiscourse removed ones. The results of data analysis showed that students in all three levels of reading proficiency performed better on metadiscourse enriched test booklet than their counterpart groups who took the metadiscourse removed text booklet. In comparing students’ performance on metadiscourse removed text types, it was revealed that they did more poorly on academic metadiscourse removed test booklet than on general one. The findings of this study suggest that making students aware of metadiscoursal features of different text types enhances students’ reading comprehension. Keywords: metadiscourse; reading comprehension; academic text; general texts; EFL learners
Highlights
Current theories of reading in first and second language, view reading neither as a passive, bottom-up nor top-down process, but rather as an active process in which lower and higherlevel processing skills work together interactively
The researcher had hypothesized that metadiscoursal features in a text may help EFL readers in comprehending English texts and that these features affect the comprehension of different text types differently
Guided by these hypotheses the present study set up to find out if there was any difference between the performance of EFL readers on two versions of a reading comprehension test
Summary
Current theories of reading in first and second language, view reading neither as a passive, bottom-up nor top-down process, but rather as an active process in which lower and higherlevel processing skills work together interactively. Over the past decades researchers in the area of reading and writing have turned their attentions to features in texts that are mainly used to establish another kind of interaction that takes place between the writer and the reader. These features which are collectively called metadiscourse is generally defined as “discourse about discourse” Readers at the same time use these metadiscoursal cues to read and understand the text by engaging in a dialogue which takes place between the reader and the writer. It helps them to become critical readers (Crismore 1989)
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