| Over the last two decades, several scholars have called for a greater focus on language in First-Year Composition (FYC) courses (Connors, 2000; Hyland, 2005; MacDonald, 2007; Aull, 2015; Lancaster, 2016a).This dissertation strives to answer their call by looking at a language feature called metadiscourse.Metadiscourse is a name for the formulaic language writers use to guide their readers through texts.It includes items such as transitions (e.g.in addition, on the other hand, however), hedges (e.g.probably, likely), boosters (e.g.absolutely, certainly), and a variety of other words used to signal stance and organization.Based on Aull’s (2015) comparison of metadiscourse use by college freshmen and expert academicwriters, I developed a curriculum to help FYC students learn more about metadiscourse commonly used in academic writing.After implementing this instruction in six different composition classes, I was able to gain important insights on metadiscourse instruction, with five overall guidelines that instructors can follow when teaching metadiscourse in FYC.Keywords: metadiscourse, academic writing, first-year composition, discourse, corpus, linguistics, genre |