Abstract

Content area writing has received a huge amount of attention recently from English for Specific Purposes writers and researchers because of difficulties in which writers seek to achieve reader-friendly texts. Metadiscourse, a non-informational perspective, is important to description of a style. Therefore, we wish to explore how author arrange a telecommunication textbook from a perspective of metadiscourse depending on a series of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The corpus consists of two parallel chapters extracted from Communication Systems written by Simon Haykins, which is published by leading publishers and widely used in the teaching of telecommunication. We expect to find out its unique metadiscourse pattern in the genre of telecommunication textbook and to seek the reasons why author arrange texts in this way. However, we find that there is no outstanding difference of textual metadiscourse and interpersonal metadiscourse in seven sub-texts performing distinct communicative purposes. Nevertheless, subtler disparity can be traced in more specific categories. While this paper develops a rather skewed view of writing practices by methods of impersonal statistics, further empirical studies could center on readers' subjective responses to metadiscourse so as to authentically explore its interactive performance.

Keywords：Metadiscourse; Telecommunication; Textbook

摘要

近年来，越来越多的特殊用途英语作者和研究者开始关注如何能写出更容易让读者接受的文本。元语言则是一种重要的研究文本特点的视角，侧重的是观点内容外的文本内容。本文旨在通过元语言视角，运用一系列定量分析和定性分析来探究作者如何组织通信类教材的文本语言。本文语料来自西蒙·赫金编写的《通信原理》一书中的两个章节。此书由权威出版社发行并广泛用于通信教学中。我们希望可以发现通信学教材中的独特的元语言特征以及作者组织语言的原因。经统计分析后发现，七种有着不同交流目的的次文本中并没有明显的包括文本元语言和人际元语言在内的元语言特征区别。但是，在不同的元语言分类下依然有着细微的差别。本文仅限于通过客观的数据进行统计，更多实例研究可以注重读者对元语言的主观感受从而更加主观地探究文本的交际作用。

关键词：元语言；通信学；教材

Chapter One Introduction
1.1    Background
Content area writing has received a huge amount of attention recently from English for Specific Purposes (ESP) writers and researchers because of difficulties in which writers seek to achieve reader-friendly texts. Theorists agree that there are two dimensions of texts that help establish author-reader connection, the propositional /referential dimension and non-propositional/non-referential dimension. Normally, theorists tend to place premium on the more traditional propositional level, deeming categories like structure, coherence, unity and audience appropriateness the golden rules of judging whether a text is “considerate.” It is in more recent time that research attention has been drawn to the more non-propositional level—metadiscourse—and its role in constructing a more reader-friendly text.