Learning Interactional Metadiscourse in an EFL Educational Context: Insights from Case Stories
Date
2025
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National Foreign Language Resource Center
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15
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1
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23
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Abstract
Written modes of communication have gained prominence in the last few decades, fostered by the development of technology-mediated communication, such as e-mail or chat. Even within diverse communicative scenarios, writers must appropriately employ interactional metadiscourse markers to help readers understand their intentions regarding the message being conveyed, and learning to use metadiscourse markers appropriately becomes crucial. This study explores individual trajectories of four case learners (low and high generators of interactional metadiscourse). Each participant wrote their opinion about school issues in three e-mails addressed to the school principal over one academic year. Considering that metadiscourse has been identified as a resource used by writers to persuade readers (Hyland, 2005, 2017), pragmatic competence was measured as the ability to produce interactional metadiscourse (e.g., in my opinion). The results illustrate the complexity of the process of learning interactional metadiscourse. The study showed variation and fluctuations at the individual level, which were related to aspects such as learners’ affective domain and attitude toward content learned in the classroom, their overall academic performance at school, and their social integration with their classmates. The paper discusses pedagogical implications related to the need for teachers to
consider the dimensions that learners bring with them into the classroom (e.g., emotions, socialization with classmates and overall academic achievement), the importance of raising learners and teachers’ awareness of metadiscourse, and the suitability of using technology-mediated tasks to teach pragmatics in a real context.
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Martín-Laguna, S. (2025). Learning interactional metadiscourse in an EFL educational context: Insights from case stories. In M. González-Lloret, J. M. Sykes, & J. K. Yoshioka (Eds.), Pragmatics & Language Learning (Vol. 15, pp. 1–22). National Foreign Language Resource Center, University of Hawai‘i. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/75352
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1-23
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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