How To Engage Readers:a Comparative Study On Engagement Markers In EFL Academic Writing

In the past two decades, a large number of studies have directed attention to the need for academic writers to establish relatively harmonious relationships with their readers. Closely related to reader-oriented writing are engagement markers, coined by Hyland to refer to "the bundle of rhetorical strategies writers use to recognize the presence of their readers to bring them explicitly into their texts." Unfortunately, EFL students often have trouble employing engagement markers appropriately. What’s worse, there is a lack of in-depth studies on engagement markers. Against this background, this thesis aims to reveal the features of engagement markers in EFL academic writing.This thesis approaches the research goals first by building two corpora. One is MA corpus, consisting of20MA theses downloaded from CNKI. They were written by English majors in China from2000to2009, among which10were on the track of literature and10on the track of applied linguistics. The other corpus is expert corpus, including20research articles from Contemporary Literature and Language Learning which were written from2000to2009. Then on the basis of Hyland’s framework of engagement markers, the author subcategorizes the five elements. An analysis of the features of engagement markers is made by first comparing MA theses with expert articles and then comparing literature with applied linguistics. After data analysis, some results can be reported.1) MA students and experts employ engagement markers at nearly the same frequency, but there lie differences in the specific use of the five elements:(1) MA students do not exploit the full range of the functions of questions, and rhetorical questions enjoy a higher occurence than real questions in both corpora;(2) Expert writers use far more asides than MA students, most of which convene in the category of explanations. On the contrary, direct reader reference and reference to shared knowledge are more popular in MA theses;(3) Although MA students and experts use almost the same number of directives, the former prefer obligational modals and the latter favor imperatives.2) Literature papers use a few more engagement markers than applied linguistics papers. Major differences between the use of engagement markers in the two disciplines lie in the following three elements:(1) Applied linguisitcs papers have a strong preference for directives, especially obligational modals, but literature papers tend to use directives in a citational manner to mitigate the imposition inherent in such linguistic devices;(2) Direct reader reference mostly convenes in literature, with the most frequent being inclusive first person pronoun and the least frequent being second person pronoun;(3) Reference to shared knowledge enjoys higher occurence in literature, with the single-word subcategory more popular than the multi-word.The study has two major pedagogical implications. First, there is a call for sufficient and appropriate training of EFL students on the use of engagement markers so as to improve their academic writing. Second, more attention shall be directed to the research on engagement markers by digging into their usage across subdiscplines or extending the research subjects beyond English-speaking countries.