The Use of Metadiscourse Markers in Malaysian Undergraduate Persuasive Essay Corpus at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan

Abstract

Metadiscourse in undergraduate essay writing is the linguistic expressions used by student writers to organise written texts while interacting with their imaginary readers. This paper presents a preliminary study to discover and present the use of metadiscourse markers in persuasive essays written by a group of undergraduate students from a chosen public university in Malaysia, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan. For the purpose of this study, a simplified metadiscourse framework for ESL lay writers proposed by Tan et al. (2012) is used. The metadiscourse markers in a corpus of undergraduate persuasive essays were explored with the assistance of a concordance software, WordSmith Tools. The findings reveal the frequency of the metadiscourse markers in the corpus and how they are commonly utilised in sentences. This study is expected to pave the way for more studies related to metadiscourse in undergraduate essays from other universities across this country.