A Comparative Analysis Of Interactional Metadiscourse In The Literature Review Of Chinese And American Master Theses

In recent years,the study of interactional metadiscourse has attracted much attention.Interactional metadiscourse has been widely studied and applied in all kinds of terminological discourse because it is good at constructing the interpersonal meaning of discourse and improving readers’ trust and discourse participation.Accordingly,Chinese and foreign comparative studies have also been selected by more scholars.Based on the analytical framework of Hyland(2005a),this thesis makes quantitative and qualitative analysis through a self-built corpus,in order to explore the distribution characteristics of interactional meta discourse in the literature review of Chinese English major master theses and American native language master theses in the direction of linguistics.The author uses Antconc 3.5.9 to retrieve the interactional metadiscourse categories listed by Hyland(2005a)and Hyland and Jiang Feng(2016).And then,the author observes their collocation characteristics and judges them one by one according to the context.After obtaining the initial frequency,the author carries out standardization and Chi-square test.The Chi-square test tool Loglikelihood and Chi-square Calculator 1.0 is used to test whether there are significant differences between the interactional metadiscourse in the literature review of Chinese and American master theses.Then,this thesis explores the grammatical distribution of high-frequency words in interactional metadiscourse.Finally,based on statistical data,qualitative analysis is carried out to explore the reasons behind it.The results show that in literature review,both Chinese and American masters lack the use of interactional metadiscourse.But Chinese masters use more interactional metadiscourse than American masters,especially in the four subcategories of hedges,boosters,engagement markers and self-mentions,while there is no significant difference in attitude markers.Although Chinese master students use more interactional metadiscourse in quantity,they prefer description rather than evaluation in writing.In other words,American masters and Chinese masters are both novices in academic paper writing,but the problems of Chinese masters are more serious.The main reasons for this difference are as follows:For American master students,they have inherent advantages in using English.In addition,American master students own many thesis training courses and scientific research courses,which makes them gain more thesis writing experience and more rigorous scientific awareness.Therefore,they behave more calm in the process of thesis writing.For Chinese master students,courses of language skills account for their main courses and they have few scientific research courses,which leads to the lack of thesis writing experience for Chinese master students.Most of the time,Chinese masters don’t know how to write a thesis.This lack of thesis consciousness makes Chinese master students not clear how to persuade readers and establish relationships with readers in their theses.Therefore,Chinese master students often do not have their own views in their thesis writing,and they only state questions rather than evaluate questions in their theses.Through the comparative analysis of interactional metadiscourse in the literature review of Chinese and American master theses,we can find the shortcomings of Chinese masters in academic writing to improve their writing quality of literature review.