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5 Discussion

5.3 Implications for English writing instruction

The findings reported in the articles hold useful information for writing instructors in L1 and L2 contexts looking to anticipate the metadiscoursal competence of pre-tertiary pupils and freshman university students. Of note is the overall finding that this corpus of pre-tertiary writing is characterised by a broader range of metadiscourse features than would be expected in academic writing. For example, the pupils in this study relied on a wide range of features to express their attitudinal reactions.

Furthermore, some of the markers were of a more informal style. For instance, “down to” was found to function as an inferential transition,

“*ish” was used as a downtoner, and “stupid” was used as an attitude

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marker. While this project did not account for the appropriateness of these markers, the wide range of markers indicates that pupils at this level may benefit from further instruction in distinguishing formal from informal styles, but this requires further investigation.

Previous studies have investigated the effects of proactively2 teaching metadiscourse features to tertiary level novice writers (Cheng &

Steffensen, 1996; Crosthwaite & Jiang, 2017; Dastjerdi & Shirzad, 2012). These studies have found that explicit instruction in the use of metadiscourse is related to improvements in written quality. However, there are two caveats in considering these teaching practices for the upper secondary level. Firstly, since metadiscourse has been operationalised in so many ways, it may be difficult to choose the most appropriate taxonomy on which teachers should focus. Furthermore, although the taxonomy used for this study offers a comprehensive categorisation of the features present in the upper secondary essays, it would be challenging and time-consuming to proactively instruct pupils in the use of 26 sub-categories pertaining to signposting and stance. This may be particularly impractical in the UK, where teachers reported that they expected pupils to have learned about signposting at earlier educational levels and therefore do not address these features at the upper secondary level. A further complication is that some of these features may be referred to using other terms, such as “linking words” instead of signposts. Additionally, it may be more useful for pupils to think about textual relations at the sentential level, rather than at the word level. For example, instead of thinking about individual inferential transitions, it may be more effective to think about the larger cause-effect relations. A more manageable solution could be for English teachers to take a more reactive approach to teaching metadiscourse, which would involve providing metadiscourse-related feedback on pupil essays according to individual needs. Individual feedback may be particularly useful for the

2 According to Doughty and Williams (1998), proactive writing instruction requires that teachers anticipate which forms pupils should learn.

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pupils in Norway and Sweden, who are learning English as an L2.

However, studies that have compared proactive and reactive approaches to grammar teaching have tended to report that proactive ones are more successful (Bakshiri & Mohammadi, 2014). Further research could also investigate whether proactive approaches are more effective for teaching metadiscourse.

The second caveat is that while proactively teaching the technical aspects of metadiscourse may hold potential for writing development, such teaching methods may not be readily adopted in the present educational contexts, particularly Norway and Sweden. Firstly, English teachers may already devote a considerable amount of classroom time to teaching formal grammar, since this has strong roots in language teaching (e.g.

Dypedal & Hasselgård, 2018) and is typically prescribed by English curricula3. Secondly, there is a tendency in these contexts to prioritise more holistic, communicative approaches to language teaching (Kim-Rivera, 1999; Krashen, 1993; Richards & Rodgers, 2014; Skulstad, 2018). Even though studies of metadiscourse are concerned with the markers that writers use to communicate with their readers, the idea of introducing pupils to the communicative functions of numerous sub-categories may seem unfeasible.

A potential solution to both of these caveats could be for upper secondary teachers to utilise genre pedagogies (e.g. Ellis & Johnson, 1998; Hyland, 2007b; Kuteeva, 2013). This involves engaging students in identifying genre-specific features in texts that represent the purposes and discourse communities for which they are required to write. In addition to analysing texts, pupils could practise writing for various purposes and audiences, which may improve their ability to vary stance and signposting features according to a given communicative context (Krashen, 2013). These approaches can be related to theories of reading,

3 For example, the latest English subject curriculum in Norway requires that pupils are able to “use knowledge about grammar and text structure when producing […] texts”

(Udir, 2020, p. 11; my translation).

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which have posited that reading extensively across a range of genres can both motivate language learners and help them to develop vocabulary, fluency and contextual awareness (Hirvela, 2004; Grabe, 2008). By applying principles from reading instruction to writing instruction, teachers can prepare their pupils for the variety of styles that they may be expected to write upon entering academic and professional discourse communities.

If teachers are to offer either proactive or reactive metadiscourse instruction when exposing their pupils to writing in a range of genres, it seems necessary for teacher training courses to introduce student teachers both to the metadiscourse concept and to how these features can vary across communicative contexts. The results from the teacher interviews suggest that, although the teachers demonstrated some awareness of metadiscourse features, a majority did not teach their pupils to recognise how signposting and stance may vary according to a given written context. Instead, they tended to offer categorical advice pertaining to what pupils should or should not do when writing English essays. For example, 18 teachers reported that they encouraged using either hedges or boosters when making claims. Only one teacher commented that appropriate hedging and boosting can vary according to the communicative context. Thus, by acknowledging, for example, that plausibility hedges can open dialogic space when making knowledge claims, downtoners can mark modesty when discussing creative choices, amplifiers can enhance the persuasive effect of an argument, and so on, teachers can offer contextually informed compositional advice to their pupils.