The Relationship Between Writing Tasks and Second Language Writers’ Use of Metadiscourse

Abstract: This study investigates how Vietnamese preservice EFL teachers use linguistic resources to express authorial stance and engage with readers in their academic writing, with a specific focus on writing tasks as a source of influence. The data includes a corpus of 550 English essays and writing perception questionnaires by 110 learners of EFL from a university in Vietnam. The essay corpus was annotated based on Hyland’s (2011) framework of interactional metadiscourse. Questionnaire responses were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively together with corpus statistics. Initial findings suggest that the essay prompts played a significant role in predicting the use of written metadiscourse. The results have implications for EFL students, writing teachers, task designers, test developers, and teacher educators in Vietnam and similar contexts.