The use of metadiscourse by secondary-level Chinese learners of English in examination scripts: insights from a corpus-based study

Abstract Metadiscourse plays a significant role in determining the quality of writing. While a growing number of studies have investigated the use of metadiscourse by adult second language learners in academic writing at the tertiary level, studies on how secondary-level students adopt such linguistic resources in other genres, particularly in examination writing, remain few. The present study addresses this research gap by examining the distributions of metadiscourse markers in a corpus of 120 low-, medium-, and high-rated advice-giving texts (letters and reports) randomly selected from the Hong Kong public examination of English language writing, written by secondary-level Chinese learners of English. Using Hyland’s (2019) framework of metadiscourse, the study found considerable variation in the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse across genres (letters vs. reports) and the final exam grades awarded to texts. Implications for teaching English to pre-tertiary Chinese writers are discussed with suggestions for future research.