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Chapter 1  Introduction 

Both spoken and written language are used to achieve communication goals, such as  persuasion,  information,  entertainment.  Metadiscourse  is  a  powerful  device  to realize  these  various  communication  purposes.  This  paper  attempts  to  investigate  the use  of  metadiscourse  in  range-finder  writing  samples  which  are  randomly  selected from  College  English  Test  Band  4  (CET-4).  This  chapter  first  reviews  the  internal relations  between  writing  and  metadiscourse;  then  it  describes  the  research  aims  and significance; and in the last part it points out the structure of the present study.  

1.1 Background of the Study 
Writing involves far more than just linguistic knowledge; it also entails gathering， analyzing，organizing  information,  and  presenting  it  in  a  way  that  it  is  easily understood. However, most scholars pay much attention to the propositions in writing, which is a “dangerous tendency” (Coates, 1987:113). As an advanced model of output, writing is a weak part both in students’ examinations and practices and how to improve their  writing  skills  attracts  more  and  more  scholars’  attention  nowadays.  During  the past  decades  a  lot  of  achievements  have  been  gained  both  in  theory  and  practice  of writing. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the interactive and rhetorical character of writing. Metadiscourse comes into scholars’ vision. There are two levels of discourse involved in any form of language communication: the primary discourse level,  which  consists  of  propositional  meanings  and  the  metadiscourse  level,  which consists  of  propositional  attitudes,  textual  meanings,  and  interpersonal  meanings (Crismore, 1989). Characterized as “writing about writing, discourse about discourse”, metadiscourse  “helps  writers  arrange  and  organize  the  content  to  influence  readers’ understanding of both the text and their attitude towards its content and the audience” (Hyland, 1998: 436). 
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1.2 Objectives of the Study
Considering the correlation between writing levels and the use of metadiscourse, this  paper  investigates  the  use  of  metadiscourse  in  writing  samples  of  CET-4.  The writing samples are divided into HG and LG and contrastive analysis is employed to probe  into  the  similarities  and  differences  between  two  groups  in  the  general  and specific use of metadiscourse markers, by which the weakness of compositions in LG will  be  illustrated.  Next,  the  frequency  of  metadiscourse  markers  is  explored  to  find which  subcategory(s)  本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。