METADISCOURSE STRATEGIES IN RESEARCH ARTICLES: A STUDY OF THE DIFFERENCES ACROSS SUBSECTIONS

The implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization have made teaching it a challenging task for a large group of practitioners in academic setting. One such feature of academic writing susceptible to cultural mentalities is metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one of the important rhetorical aspects in the writing process. Therefore, through analyzing interactive and interactional metadiscourse strategies use, this study makes an attempt to find out the normal metadiscursive distribution in the various cognitive-generic structures within the socio-genreic structure of research articles (RAs). For the purpose of this study, a small corpus of ۵۴ research articles from social and natural sciences was selected for a close manual qualitative analysis. It appeared that, though globally similar in many ways, different IMRD sections (i.e. Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion) of RAs which follow different cognitive genre types (i.e. conviction, description, argumentation, etc.) use interactive and interactional strategies differently. The findings are analyzed and implications are drawn for the teachers and learners of writing research articles in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes. It is argued that without such characterizations the writers from different nationalities might generalize the norms of their own culture, which are in most cases inconsistent with the conventions of English language.

Keywords:

research articles , metadiscourse , rhetorical structure , academic writing