Shirin Rezaei Keramati; Davud Kuhi; Mahnaz Saeidi
Abstract
Thanks to recent developments in metadiscourse studies, it is now increasingly accepted that metadiscourse practices are closely related to social activities, cognitive styles and epistemological beliefs of academic communities. Despite widespread interest and research among applied linguists to explore ...
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Thanks to recent developments in metadiscourse studies, it is now increasingly accepted that metadiscourse practices are closely related to social activities, cognitive styles and epistemological beliefs of academic communities. Despite widespread interest and research among applied linguists to explore metadiscourse use, very little is known of how metadiscourse resources have evolved over time in response to the historically developing practices of academic communities. Motivated by such an ambition, the current research drew on a corpus of 4.3 million words taken from three leading journals of applied linguistics in order to trace the diachronic evolution of stance and engagement markers across four different sections of research articles (Introduction, Method, Result, Discussion/ Conclusion) from 1996 to 2016. Hyland’s (2005b) model of metadiscourse was adopted for the analysis of the selected corpus. The data were explored using concordance software AntConc (Anthony, 2011). Moreover, a Chi-Square statistical measure was run to determine statistical significances. The analysis revealed a significant decline in the overall frequency of metadiscourse resources in all sections of RAs. Interestingly, this decrease was entirely due to the overall decline in the use of stance markers particularly in result and method sections. It might be argued that, diachronic perspective on metadiscourse contributes to teachers and novice writers’ awareness of the malleability of academic writing and its sensitivity to context as well as providing access to current practices for the creation and delivery of teaching materials in EAP courses.
Saeed Rezaei; Masoumeh Estaji; Mahdi Hasanpour
Volume 2, Issue 1 , February 2015, , Pages 71-43
Abstract
One of the most salient written academic outputs a university student has the opportunity to create is a thesis which is regarded as “a complex student-produced research genre” (Lee & Casal, 2014). In order to compare the rhetorical features and preferences of distinct discourse communities ...
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One of the most salient written academic outputs a university student has the opportunity to create is a thesis which is regarded as “a complex student-produced research genre” (Lee & Casal, 2014). In order to compare the rhetorical features and preferences of distinct discourse communities and evaluate academic writing, a special and long-term attention, on the part of the writers, is required for analyzing the metadiscourse features of the texts (Hyland, 2004). To this end, the present study examined the differences in the use, type, and frequency of interactional metadiscourse markers in theses written by M.A. applied linguistics graduates including 10 males and 10 females from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. The selected corpus was analyzed using Hyland’s (2005) interactional model of metadiscourse. The data were explored through a manual corpus analysis method using Adobe PDF reader software. Moreover, a Chi-Square statistical measure was run to examine whether there were any significant differences in the use of metadiscourse markers in different thesis chapters and across different genders. The results revealed that although there were some subtle differences in the frequency and types of these metadiscourse markers, there was no statistically significant difference between two genders in the use of interactional metadiscourse markers. Besides, it was concluded that there was a significant relationship between the chapters of theses and the use of metadiscourse markers. The findings of this study render some pedagogical implications for writing courses at M.A. and PhD levels in the realms of TEFL and ESP.
