A Metadiscourse-Based Study Of Interaction In English Research Articles By Chinese Engineering Graduate Students

Academic discourse (AD) has traditionally been regarded as impersonal and objective. This view has gradually been replaced by a perception of academic writing as a social interaction between writers and readers. It places reader-writer relationship at the heart of academic writing and sees academics not only as producing texts that represent external reality, but also as using language to acknowledge, construct and negotiate social relations. To meet the expectations of readers and gain their acceptance, writers of academic texts need to present their claims cautiously and accurately by evaluating their own materials, claiming solidarity with their readers and acknowledging their readers'alternative views. Under this background, this study examines a relatively neglected area in which Chinese engineering graduate student (CS) writers of research articles (RAs) interact with their readers.The study is founded on the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL holds the view that there are three kinds of meaning which operate simultaneously in all utterances----the ideational, the textual and the interpersonal. Interaction is a form of realization of interpersonal meaning in discourse.Based on Thompson (1995)'s distinction of two types of interaction in written texts, the study makes use of Hyland's model of metadiscourse resources in academic texts (2004b) as the analytical framework to examine interactions in RAs written by the CS and by the engineering graduate students educated in English-speaking countries (SE). Due to different cultural backgrounds of the two groups of students, we add cross-cultural awareness in RA writing as a new research variable to investigate the preferred ways of writing shaped by culture-specific thought patterns in our examining interactions.The study reveals that most of the CS writers do not seem to have a clear understanding of the persuasive nature of AD and are not fully aware of the important role of interaction in the construction of an academic argument. They also have cross-cultural problems in composing RAs in English as their texts differ in many ways from Anglo-American academic writing conventions. These problems suggest that the CS writers lack an explicit instruction of the persuasive nature and interpersonal meaning of RA; of rules, conventions and some important features of RA; of the knowledge of social interactions involved in the construction of knowledge; of how to meet the dual demands of objective fact and subjective evaluation in RA writings and of the reader's role in the establishment of an academic argument. Knowledge of these may help the CS writers make informed linguistic choices and present their claims in ways that the disciplinary community finds acceptable. This is clearly an area which concerns EAP teachers in China. Therefore, we argue for an effective instruction of acculturating students into academic discourse conventions and practices in Chinese universities.