Metadiscourse in Students’ Academic Writing: Case Study of Umaru Musa Yar’adua University and Al-Qalam University Katsina

Studies on writing, thus, become crucial because when students make the transition from Secondary School to a Tertiary Institution, they encounter many challenges. One of them is the writing of B.A projects. Most of these undergraduate students both in L1 (English as a first language) and L2 (English as a second language) still find it difficult to argue, discuss or evaluate competently as well as persuasively in English essay writing. The present study aimed at exploring metadiscoursal choice and its influence on the success of students’ academic writing. The study was conducted within the framework of Appraisal Theory. The data was randomly generated from the written essays by thirty selected Level 400 students both from Umaru Musa Yar’adua University and Al-Qalam University Katsina. Also, the data was descriptively alaysed and presented. It was discovered that six (6) of the essays do not contain the relevant elements for this study, thus excluded from the analysis. To achieve the main objective of this study, the first six categories of the most successful essays and the least successful ones were taken for in-depth analysis. They were analysed paragraph by paragraph and then each interactional metadiscourse element was separately discussed as a whole. The findings showed that many of the students were not exposed to these elements, thus, they write academic essay the way they speak. It is against these findings that the present study unravels that embedding the teaching of metadiscourse in cumulative learning practices could consequently empower students to develop both linguistically and intellectually.