Parisa Ahmadi - ELT Instructor, Payam Noor University, Ardabil Br anch & Ph.D. Candidate in TEFL, Urmia University
Javad Gholami - Associate Professor, ELT Department, Faculty of Humanities, Urmia University

Despite the major theoretical developments in second language reading comprehension over the last decades, many attempts at explaining the role of knowledge about metadiscourse markers in ESP and EAP readingcomprehension are insufficient in the realm of metadiscourse. The academic discourse has been reported to bepersuasive. Metadiscourse is the linguistic system that enables writers to get positive evaluation of their studies andnegative evaluation of previous ones. Two groups of students in accounting read selected extracts from two versions of the same text differing according to quantity and type of metadiscourse. Each group then took a reading comprehension test and their mean scores were compared. Results showed that language proficiency was the main blocking factorconfirming the linguistic threshold hypothesis. The findings suggest that a more pronounced use of metadiscourse may be associated with improved comprehension in some cases. A post-reading questionnaire showed that students had substantially no awareness ofmetadiscourse. The results provide useful indications for further research and also highlight the need for targeted instruction on metadiscourse in ESP reading courses. The findings have important implications on how metadiscourse might improve field related research articles comprehension in English.

EAP, Genre analysis, metadiscourse markers, reading comprehension