The Effect of Metadiscourse Use on Iranian EFL Learners’ Lecture Comprehension

摘要

The literature on the theory of metadiscourse markers suggests that one significant function fulfilled by this type of resources is facilitating the comprehensibility of texts. Although many researchers have investigated this function in written texts, there has been little research on the role metadiscourse plays in the comprehension of spoken discourse. The aim of the present study was to gain insights into the effect of metadiscourse use on Iranian EFL learners’ lecture comprehension. To do so, 22 students were selected to participate in the study. In order to assess the students’ language proficiency a pre-test, namely Oxford Placement Test (OPT), was used. Then the subjects were randomly divided into two groups. During ten sessions, students in two groups listened to lectures with different topics in the field of linguistics by the teacher. Two versions of the same lecture were used. One of them included metadiscourse markers (Hyland's model, 2005) and in the other one, metadiscourse markers were removed. To measure learners’ listening comprehension, a test consisting of a set of lecture-related questions (post-test) was administered. Then both groups of participants were asked to answer a questionnaire to assess the perceived level of the difficulty and the quality of the lecture. In order to analyze the obtained data, an independent t-Test was run. The findings of the study revealed that the subjects comprehended the lecture better when metadiscourse markers were included.