‘Like I said’: Written feedback using metadiscourse language proves complicated

LAWRENCE – However. In other words. To conclude. I mean.

Metadiscourse — words used to organize a text — are so prevalent that they often go by unnoticed.

“People rely on metadiscourse to communicate, such as to refer back to something they have said or to point a person’s attention to something that’s going to be said,” said Wen Xin, assistant teaching professor of English at the University of Kansas.

While metadiscourse is frequently analyzed within academic genres, Xin and Lei Jiang, assistant professor in KU’s Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, have found an untapped area within the discipline. Their new article “From monologic to dialogic: Conceptual and methodological issues in metadiscourse studies” illustrates several problematic issues when implementing the two influential models of metadiscourse into the genre of written feedback.

The article appears in Research Methods in Applied Linguistics.

“In monologic genres — like student essays or research articles or textbooks — metadiscourse has been much researched, whereas not a lot of researchers actually have studied metadiscourse in written dialogic genres,” Xin said.

“Written feedback is a good example of a dialogic genre. You must first read a student’s text in order to respond to it. This sort of interconnection makes written feedback unique.”

Currently, metadiscourse conceptualizations and their analytic models rely heavily on two main scholars, Xin said:

1. British linguist Ken Hyland, who views metadiscourse as the linguistic resources that carry out interpersonal function and textual function of language but not the ideational (or propositional) function.

2. Swedish researcher Annelie Ädel, who views metadiscourse as essentially a form of linguistic reflexivity, which is the capacity of language to refer to or describe itself.

“When researchers try to apply either of the analytic models by the two scholars to written feedback, they’re going to have trouble because those two models don’t work very well conceptually or methodologically,” Xin said.

For instance, how can such models explain a reference to the ever present professorial tool known as the grading rubric?

“You would count this as metadiscourse under Hyland’s framework, and it would be categorized as an evidential marker, which basically means it’s something authors use to back up their argument. However, a reference to the grading rubric in written feedback usually isn’t used to back up an argument but to help students better understand the comment,” Xin said.

One thing that has been demonstrated in metadiscourse studies is the element varies according to contexts.

“For example, in lectures, people use metadiscourse one way. In handbooks, people use metadiscourse in another way. This is something researchers agree upon, but our finding is that metadiscourse conceptualization is context sensitive, and its analysis is also context dependent,” Xin said.

Xin spent 2015-2021 as a doctoral student at KU. He was brought on as full-time faculty in 2023. His research focuses on language elements and their synchronic variation and diachronic change.

“I also focus on their implications. So if I see there is a variation of metadiscourse use between native speakers and non-native speakers in written feedback, I consider what does that mean,” Xin said.

Xin said he intends for his conceptualization of metadiscourse to better account for the inherently dialogic and intertextual nature of written feedback. He also believes this approach may be adaptable to other dialogic written genres, such as email exchanges or online forum posts.

“When people study metadiscourse, they just draw upon one of the existing models without really thinking about whether it is going to work,” he said. “I hope they give those models a second thought. Do not take them as rigid templates because they only work for specific genres.”