Scrutinizing Metadiscourse Functions in Indonesian EFL Students: A Case Study on Written and Spoken Discourses
Fatimatuz Zahro, Agwin Degaf, Irham
Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang
Abstract
In recent years, metadiscourse study has been used to describe the linguistic features applied in academic English domain, which mostly focused on written data, such as academic essays, research articles, etc. The spoken discourses such speech and classroom presentation remain unexplored. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the potential similarities and differences between written and spoken English and comprehensively discuss these distinctive features. We employ the metadiscourse theory by Ken Hyland (1994, 2000) which unfolds two metadiscourse ways of analysis: the taxonomy of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers. This theory is important to understand how the social engagement occurs between the speaker/writer and their audiences; how well their discourse is being understood. We also employed qualitative research approach, through which the data were gathered by observing 8 students- presentation and 70 writing tasks in Academic Writing class. The finding shows that the interactive markers are used more than the interactional devices in both spoken (1616) and written discourse (278), while the interactional markers found were 855 cases in spoken and 133 written discourses. This result reflects the students- preference in conveying their audience by connect and highlight their arguments rather than showing their commitments and the audience-s involvement in the text.
Keywords: Metadiscourse analysis, linguistic features, EFL students, discourse analysis, academic writing, academic speech.
Topic: International Conference of English Language Teaching, Literature & Linguistics