Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly (Formerly Journal of Teaching Language Skills)

An Analysis of Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse: Native vs. Non-native Author Dichotomy

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

English Department, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

Mounting attention has recently been paid to authorial stance in academic writing due to its important role in the interpersonal aspect of writing, encompassing the ways in which authors establish connections, convey attitudes, and engage with an audience. This study was an attempt to explore how native and non-native authors of Applied Linguistics deploy linguistic features to project their authorial stance. To this end, a corpus of 100 research articles authored by native and non-native researchers was collected from journals in the field of ELT. Hyland's Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse (2005) was employed to differentiate the features produced and figure out how authors navigate the complexities of expressing their meaning while considering the ELT community expectations, and SPSS was used to analyze the data. Based on the results, the proportion of interactive resources was found to surpass that of interactional resources in both native and non-native writings, with transitions being the leading feature, followed by evidentials; and regarding the interactional resources, boosters, and hedges were the most dominant features employed by native and non-native authors, respectively. Overall, no tendency was found towards textuality through which authors consider the target audience (engagement markers), signal their confidence through the portrayal of authors' feelings (attitude markers), and take credit for their findings (self-mentions) throughout the whole corpus, particularly non-native writings. It seems that writing courses offered in non-native contexts require improvements to meet the standards of academic writing. Therefore, the study has important implications for both non-native and novice researchers and course designers.

Keywords

Main Subjects

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Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly (Formerly Journal of Teaching Language Skills)
Volume 43, Issue 2
May 2024
Pages 31-48
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History
  • Receive Date: 13 January 2024
  • Revise Date: 25 April 2024
  • Accept Date: 07 May 2024
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