Abstract
There is lack of studies on the use of metadiscourse markers; especially amongst international students studying in Malaysia and Malaysia are receiving scores of international students particularly from the Middle East annually. This study involves a textual analysis of students’ academic writing where the metadiscourse markers in 50 Arab IIUM students’ academic texts were identified and analyzed. The findings of this study indicated that Arab writers had a greater inclination for the deployment of the interactive markers (Total counts = 919) than interactional ones (Total counts = 592) as there was a higher percentage of interactive metadiscourse (60.8%) usage than the interactional ones (39.2%). It might be useful for English language teachers to integrate cultural considerations within their syllabus with regard to metadiscourse markers in order to prepare relevant materials based on their students’ needs as well as to develop the students’ awareness of the importance of these linguistic features.
Highlights
1.1 Background of studyWriting essays is an important part of a student’s life at the university for the reason that they have to write essays for their assignments
The third least frequently applied interactive metadiscourse markers in the students’ essays, Code glosses, might be owed to the fact that the students habitually undertook that their intentional readers already acquired sufficient contextual knowledge to comprehend and appreciate whatever messages they were conveying in the texts
Another important finding was that Arab pre-university writers had a greater inclination for the deployment of the interactive markers than interactional ones as there was a higher percentage of interactive metadiscourse usage than the interactional ones among the students
Summary
1.1 Background of studyWriting essays is an important part of a student’s life at the university for the reason that they have to write essays for their assignments. The quality of the written assignments would have a significant influence on their academic achievement. The capability to compose academic texts competently at institution of higher education is a practical anticipation to be grasped by the tertiary learners [1]. In order to compose a comprehensible writing, the learners need to employ appropriate metadiscourse markers within their written tasks. According to Hyland and Tse (2004), the metadiscourse markers are important resources deployed to designate how the text is organized, to clarify difficult words and jargons for readers, and to put into code what rhetorical acts are being performed [3]. Competent employment of metadiscourse markers will make a text readable
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