Applied Linguistics Master Thesis Meta Discourse Analysis In English

Metadiscourse as a relatively new concept in the field of discourse analysis, paid more attention on by a growing number of academic researchers, has become the focus of the study. Many stylistic researches have been proved the importance of metadiscourse in different genres. Besides, some researchers mainly have done sufficient researches on how to use vocabulary, grammar and a complete sentence about students’writing, although others have converted to discourse level, they only focus on grammar means of writings and the generation of contents. But, they neglect the other important aspect of communication—readers, writers should make the interaction between writers and readers through their writings.The abstract as a special genre summarizes the full text and conveys the essence of the entire paper, the wording of the statement in writing abstracts should be objective, accurate and effective. Furthermore, the paper randomly selected50excellent English abstracts of national outstanding master dissertations as a corpus, According to Hyland interpersonal metadiscourse classification model framework. Because the function of metadiscourse depend on contextual factors, the sub-item of metadiscourse marks focus on the function in the specific context. This study uses the manual method to label metadiscourse features, avoiding the mechanization of statistical software.This study aims to analyze metadiscourse analysis in the distribution and the use of specific features on English abstracts of master’s thesis. The research finds that the frequency of interactive element is higher than the interactional metadiscourse in the abstracts (53.8%:47.2%), that indicates the writers in writing are more emphasis on the construction of discourse, transferring ideas by the construction of the discourse, however, they relatively lack of the interactional communication between readers and authors. Transition is the highest frequency of the metadiscourse markers in abstracts, followed by Hedges and framework marker, that is (23.67%:14.64%:12.44%); the abstract should reflects the main content and research findings of the paper objective and concisely, because the content of a abstract should not be too long, restricted by genre, and use endophoric mark and evidential (7.68%:5.55%) less than other sub-item metadiscourse. The study has shown that the metadiscourse can be an effective way to construct discourse, and guide readers to understand the textual structure in order to persuade the readers to understand the intention of the author’s writing and establish an interactional relationship between the authors and the reader.This paper was designed to reveal how the metadiscourse can effectively help the authors to convey the intention of their writing and established interpersonal relationship between author and reader, so as to provide the valuable information in writing English abstract and raise the awareness of using metadiscourse in written text for Chinese students.