Gender Differences on the Use of Metadiscourse on Reflective Essays: A Case Study of Inbound Students

Abstract

During the age of global learning, students’ mobility has popularized edutourism in universities around the world. Generally, students benefit in many ways. Although students completed surveys to document how they felt about their stay, the use of reflective essays can be useful for the organizers to find out how the participants felt about their stay in the host country. This study explored the data in students’ reflective essays to find out how they felt about their experience learning English in Malaysia. Specially, the use of metadiscourse is used to analyse the students’ attitudes and emotions about what they gained from the edutourism programme. The data was analysed based on interactive or interactional metadiscourse. Findings revealed students used interactive metadiscourse such as transitions, frame markers and code glosses; They used interactional metadiscourse such as hedges, boosters and self-mentions in their essays to reveal how they felt about their learning experience.