The Use of Metadiscourse in Good Malaysian Undergraduate Persuasive Essays

Abstract

Metadiscourseis used by a writer to organise his text and textually interact with the potential readers. An effective use of metadiscourse reflects the writer’s writing ability because itis one of the aspects in composing process of making a successful text. However,ESL writers especially undergraduates tend to face problems in using metadiscourse markers in their writing. Many of them do not use the metadiscourse markers appropriately in their essay writing.This preliminary studyinvestigates the use of metadiscourse markers in good persuasive essays written by undergraduates from a public university in Malaysia. The corpus examined in the study was built from 195 persuasive essays written by the secondyear studentsat the university. The objective of this preliminary paper is to present the metadiscourse markers found in a corpus of good undergraduate writers’ essays. The markers are classified in the main categories (organisational and interpersonal discourse markers) and sub-categories based on Tan et al.’s (2012) simplified metadiscourse framework for ESL lay writers. Using a computer-mediated concordance software, this study aims to reveal the frequency of the metadiscourse markers use in a total of 195 good persuasive essays produced by Malaysian undergraduate writers. The findings presented in this paper are anticipated to be beneficial for other researchers who are interested in finding an example of metadiscourse markers usage in good persuasive essays.Keywords: good persuasive essays; metadiscourse; undergraduate writing; organisational discourse markers; interpersonal discourse markers.INTRODUCTIONMalaysian undergraduate students engage in many types of essay writing including argumentative, persuasive, comparative reflective and writing. They are essentially required to produce these types of essay writing in classrooms especially in English classes. This exercise is a preparation for the students to write a good English language writing in the workplacelater