Reza Abdi - Associate Professor, ELT Department, Faculty of Humanities, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili
Parisa Ahmadi - ELT Instructor, Payam Noor University, Ardabil Branch & Ph.D. Candidate in TEFL, Urmia University

Metadiscourse is particularly important at advanced levels of academic writing. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement. This study reports a comparative study of interactive metadiscourse markers in research articles across the disciplines of applied linguistics, medicine, chemistry and behavioral psychology to shed some light on the ways academic writers deploy these resources in a high stakes research genre to persuade readers in their own discourse community. Drawing on Hyland's metadiscourse framework, the study examined the use of five types of interactive metadiscourse, together with their subtypes, in a corpus of ١٠٠ research articles. No statistically significant difference was achieved by functional-contextual analysis in the use of interactive metadiscourse markers across disciplines. The analysis suggested how academic 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 uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities. The findings are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the 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.

Academic writing, Interactive metadiscourse markers, Social and Natural Sciences