Exploring Meta Discourse Strategies in Indonesian EFL Learners’ Persuasive Writing

This study attempted to investigate metadiscourse markers in Indonesian EFL learners’ Persuasive texts. Writing competence facilitates the students’ success in their studies. In order to produce a coherent text, a writer needs to employ sufficient metadiscourse markers. Persuasive writing is symbolic of students’ success with language at school where they are expected to provide reasoned, concrete arguments. Syntactic complexity is greater in Persuasive writing than in other genres. The research participants are the third-semester students taking the ‘Essay-writing’ class. The data of this study are the students’ textual and interpersonal metadiscourse markers used in their Persuasive writing, produced in the Essay-writing class under the teacher’s supervision. The data were analysed and classified based on Halliday’s language macro functions theory and metadiscourse features. The research results reveal that the occurrences of textual marker types in EFL learners’ Persuasive texts are overall closely similar to those at considered as standard proficient writing (extract from BAWE corpus), while those of interpersonal marker types are different from the standard proficient writing. The teacher needs to offer students more practice teaching interpersonal metadiscourse markers because the sorts of interpersonal markers differ from those found in the BAWE corpus in terms of hedges, boosters, and engagement markers. One tactic to help the students understand the significance of metadiscourse markers is metadiscourse analysis. The use of attitudinal markers is a key strategy to convey the writer’s affective values towards the propositional content, and to express the writer’s opinions and feelings in a personal way. This research finding is significant for the scientific community to reveal the importance of employing textual and interpersonal metadiscourse markers to produce coherent, reader-friendly texts.’