This study investigated metadiscourse in the persuasive essays of fourth graders from both urban and rural communities: 224 students in South Korea and 188 in the US. Each student was asked to write a persuasive essay in his or her native Korean or English in response to a story not previously read or discussed. Analysis with a taxonomy developed by Hyland (2004) indicated significant differences in the metadiscourse by country. In terms of interactive metadiscourse, South Korean students used more sentence-level transitions than U.S. students, who used more frame markers and endophoric markers. With regard to interactional metadiscourse, U.S. students used more hedges, boosters, engagement markers, and self-mentions in their essays. This study also compared the students' essays by the type of community in which the writers lived. In the US the essays of students in rural communities contained more hedges, whereas those of students in urban areas included significantly more self-mentions. In South Korea, no significant difference was detected in the metadiscourse of students living in rural and urban areas.Key words: metadiscourse, persuasive essay, interactive resources, interactional resourcesIn a dominant view of writing as a social practice, written texts represent interaction between the writer and the reader. The writer can facilitate interaction with the reader by using metadiscourse (Thompson, 2001), that is, linguistic material in the text "that does not add anything to the propositional content but that is intended to help the listener or reader organize, interpret, and evaluate the information given" (Crismore, Markkanen, & Steffensen, 1993, p. 40). Also used to signal the writer's attitudes both to the text content and the reader (Hyland, 1998), metadiscourse is particularly crucial in persuasive writing because the writer needs to make his or her claims clearly understood and engage the reader in the argument (Hyland, 1999). Argumentation and persuasion are bound to the contexts in which they occur, so the use of metadiscourse in a persuasive writing is closely linked to the norms and expectations of a particular cultural community. The writer should organize the contents and present the argument to the reader in a rhetorical and interpersonal manner acceptable to the conventional discursive practices of the community. Thus, the writer should first identify the readers of the persuasive text and Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/12/18 12:25 PM
