Metadiscourse in Applied Linguistics Research Articles: A Cross-Sectional Survey

Abstract

The literature on the generic features of academic discourse has revealed that the communicative purposes of
different sections of research reports (e.g. research articles) affect the degree of tentativeness, flexibility, and authorial
engagement realized by various linguistic resources. Following this assumption, a corpus of 32 research articles in the field of
applied linguistics were analyzed in order to find out both the cross-sectional (i.e. Introduction-Methodology-Results-
Discussion/Conclusion) variations in the use of metadiscourse – as a key tool for establishing interpersonal relationships in
academic writing. Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy of metadiscourse was applied to analyze the data set. The findings of the study
revealed that the authors utilized interpersonal features differently in the four rhetorical atmospheres of their texts. Writers
tended to employ high frequency of interactive metadiscourse resources in the introduction section of their articles, while in the
discussion/conclusion section writers utilized more interactional resources. The findings clearly indicate that the differences in
the discoursal functions of different sections of a research report play a significant role in writers’ fashioning of interactive and
interactional features. The results of this study can be drawn on in academic writing courses for research students and novice
writers in order to facilitate their achievement in academic writing.