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Metadiscourse refers to writers' discourse about their discourse—their directions for how readers should read, react to, and evaluate what they have written about the subject matter. In this study the authors divided metadiscourse into textual metadiscourse (text markers and interpretive markers) and interpersonal metadiscourse (hedges, certainty markers, attributors, attitude markers, and commentary). The purpose was to investigate cultural and gender variations in the use of metadiscourse in the United States and Finland by asking whether U.S. and Finnish writers use the same amounts and types and whether gender makes any difference. The analyses revealed that students in both countries used all categories and subcategories, but that there were some cultural and gender differences in the amounts and types used. Finnish students and male students used more metadiscourse than U.S. students and female students. Students in both countries used much more interpersonal than textual metadiscourse with Finnish males using the most and U.S. males the least. The study provides partial evidence for the universality of metadiscourse and suggests the need for more cross-cultural studies of its use and/or more attention to it in teaching composition.

This study examines children's use of conjunctions.Three major issues are addressed: linguistic complexity, developmental differences, and ethnic differences.The subjects for the study--third, sixth, and ninth graders-were of Anglo, Black, or Hispanic ethnicity.They completed sentence fragments ending in the conjunctions and, but, because, and even though.These conjunctions can be paired, and-but and because-even though, where the second member of each pair is basically the negative of the first.The data indicate that the positive member of each pair was easier than the negative one; the complete order of difficulty for the four conjunctions was because < and < but < even though.The order of difficulty was constant across grades and ethnic groups.For all ethnic groups there was improvement in the use of conjunctions between third and ninth grade.However, the grade by which effective mastery of each conjunction was reached differed for the three ethnic groups, being in general earliest for Anglos and latest for Hispanics.