An Analysis of Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse: Native vs. Nonnative Author Dichotomy

A mounting attention has been witnessed recently on authorial stance in academic writing due to its important role in the interpersonal aspect of writing, encompassing the ways in which authors establish connections, convey attitudes, and engage with audience. This study was an attempt to explore how native and nonnative authors of Applied Linguistics deploy linguistic features to project their authorial stance. To this end, a corpus of ۱۰۰ research articles authored by native and nonnative researchers were collected from journals in the field of ELT. Hyland’s Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse (۲۰۰۵) was employed to differentiate the features produced and figure out how authors navigate the complexities of expressing their meaning while considering the ELT community expectations; and SPSS was used to analyze the data. Based on the results, the proportion of interactive resources was found to surpass that of interactional resources in both native and nonnative writings with transitions being the leading feature, followed by evidentials; and regarding the interactional resources, boosters and hedges were the most dominant features employed by native and nonnative authors, respectively. Overall, no tendency was found towards a textuality through which authors consider the target audience (engagement markers), signal their confidence through portrayal of authors feelings (attitude markers), and take credit for their findings (self-mentions) throughout the whole corpus, particularly nonnative writings. It seems that writing courses offered in nonnative contexts require improvements to meet the standards of academic writing. Therefore, the study carries important implications for both nonnative and novice researchers, and course designers.

Keywords:

authorial stance , metadiscourse , applied linguistics , interactional and interactive resources