Do Scholars Rely on Interactive Metadiscourse Markers? An Exploratory study of Research Articles in Applied Linguistics

Metadiscourse is an interesting field of inquiry which is believed to play a vital role in organizing and producing persuasive writing, based on the norms and expectations of people involved. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement. Recent trends in the study of written texts reflect a growing interestin interaction between readers and writers. Several studies have studied metadiscourse from the descriptive and contrastive perspectives; there is a lack ofexperimental work on this topic. This study reports a comparative study of interactive metadiscourse markers in quantitative and qualitative research articlesin Applied Linguistics to shed some light on the ways academic writers deploy these resources in a high stakes research genre to persuade readers in their owndiscourse community. . Drawing on Hyland s metadiscourse framework, the studyexamined the use of five types of interactive metadiscourse, together with their subtypes, in a corpus of 100 research articles. The analysis suggested howacademic writers use language to offer a credible representation of their work in different fields, and thus how metadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncoveringsomething of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities. Frame markers strategy was the mostly occurred strategy in Applied Linguistics. The findings are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic ofthe disciplines and the epistemologies underlying the research paradigms. These findings might have implications for the teaching of academic writing and for novice writers who would like to publish their research in academic journals. This study could help develop a more plausible academic writing syllabus, which brings less visible rhetorical features of research articles under the spotlight to help avoid possible overgeneralizations from native culture.

Keywords:

Academic writing , Genre analysis , Interactive metadiscourse markers , Metadiscourse strategy , Research articles