Going meta: Bringing together an understanding of metadiscourse with students’ metalinguistic understanding

Abstract

The impetus behind this seminar series was a study ( Writing the Future ) funded by the Qatar National Research Foundation and conducted collaboratively by the University of Exeter and Qatar University. The study involved a cross-linguistic corpus analysis of metadiscourse usage in first language (L1) Arabic university students ’ argumentative texts in English and Arabic in a university in Qatar, paral-leled by ‘ writing conversation ’ interviews with a sub-sample of the student writers to explore their metalinguistic understanding of metadiscourse used in their own Arabic and English texts. Thus, it explored, firstly, the linguistic differences in metadiscourse usage in argument writing in Arabic (L1) and English (L2), and secondly, students ’ metalinguistic understanding of metadiscourse in argument texts. One important finding from the study was that students had very little metalinguistic understanding of the metadiscourse they did use, or of other metadiscoursal features that they could use: indeed, they often discussed the metadiscourse they used without reference to how it was used ‘ to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particular community ’ (Hyland, 2005, p. 37). Although the students had a strong understanding of the conventional features of argument writing, principally derived from writing instruction, they had limited metalinguistic understanding of the textual choices they could make to negotiate the relationships between writer, reader and text. Given what might be thought of as an obvious connection between what writers do in a text and their authorial understanding of the choices they make, it is perhaps surprising that current research on metadiscourse and metalinguistic understanding for writing exist as very separate fields of enquiry with very little interaction