The Taken-for-Granted Role of Metadiscourse in Teaching Reading: Iranian EFL Learners’ Achilles Heel

As a feature of text and talk, metadiscourse refers to how authors structure their writing so that readers can make sense of the text in greater depth. In navigating the process of structuring texts, proficiency level (i.e., mastery over language) has been discussed as a key variable influencing both writers’ language and readers’ understanding of those texts. However, there has not been research that fully explores the role of learners’ proficiency level in metadiscourse instruction. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate the effect of metadiscourse instruction on Iranian tertiary-level EFL learners’ reading comprehension in relation to their language proficiency level. A group of undergraduate students majoring in Teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) was chosen to participate in the research through purposive sampling. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental or a control group. The experimental group received instruction on metadiscoursal features of expository reading texts, while the control group received no instruction on metadiscourse. Data was collected in two phases: pre-and post-intervention. The results showed that the instruction of metadiscourse had a significant effect on tertiary EFL learners’ reading performance. All students of different levels of language proficiency in the experimental group outperformed their counterparts in the control group on the post-reading comprehension test. Knowledge of interactional and interactive metadiscourse equipped English as a foreign language (EFL) learners with means that improved their understanding of the text by engaging them in a dialogue with the writer. The results have implications for EFL teachers, especially reading teachers. Therefore, reading teachers are encouraged to integrate metadiscourse instruction into their lesson plans and make students aware that reading is more than extracting facts from the texts.