A Study Of The Use And Features Of Interactional Metadiscourse In The Abstracts Of L2 Academic Articles

Abstract is an essential part of academic writing. Therefore, acquiring skills in writing an abstract is of great importance, especially to novice writers. In academic abstract, metadiscourse plays an important role in knowledge construction through managing the interactions between writers and readers and thus is an integral linguistic feature. And the interactional metadiscourse markers have often been the focus of previous studies for they assist writers to conduct interaction with readers and thus make academic texts more persuasive. Previous researches mainly deal with certain type of interactional metadiscourse in research articles written by native English writers, leaving the features of interactional metadiscourse in academic abstract written by non-native English learners neglected. This study aims to investigate how Chinese postgraduate students use interactional metadiscourse markers in their graduation thesis/dissertation abstracts, what features are presented respectively in their MA thesis and PhD dissertation abstracts and what are the possible reasons. We seek to answer the following questions:1) compared with the journal article abstracts, what are the characteristics of the use of IMMs in L2 students’ thesis/dissertation abstracts? 2) What are the developmental features in the use of IMMs across two degree corpora? 3) What are the characteristics of the specific patterns of IMMs used in L2 postgraduate students’abstracts? Based on self-compiled corpus of 90 academic abstracts in the discipline of applied linguistics, the author adopts Hyland’s (2008) interpersonal model of metadiscourse as the analytical framework.Drawing on AntConc3.2.4, we document the frequency of interactional metadiscourse items and analyze the grammatical distributions of interactional metadiscourse. Comparisons are made between international journal article abstracts and Chinese students’ dissertation abstracts as well as between MA and PhD dissertation abstracts. The study comes to the following conclusions:1) In general, interactional metadiscourse markers are widely used both in published abstracts and in students’ dissertation abstracts. Two groups of writers share the same hierarchy of the frequency of four sub-categories of IMMs as well; In terms of differences, all categories of IMMs in published abstracts outnumber those in dissertation abstracts and a more balanced proportioning of interactional metadiscourse is found in abstracts written by native English speakers. There also exist recognizable differences in the grammatical distribution of specific interactional devices.2) In addition, as for the developmental features in MA and PhD dissertation abstracts, our results show that as master students move to PhD level, they generally tend to use more IMMs mainly in epistemic adjectives and adverbials to booster and first person pronouns to refer to themselves but show a decline in using attitude markers and self-mentions.3) Textual analysis of the discussion part extracted from abstracts indicates that the most salient difference is observed between journal abstracts and masters’abstracts in expressions of certainty and commitment and self-mentions.All these phenomena can be possibly attributed to the complexity of interactional metadiscourse, neglect of interpersonal aspect of language choices, differences in language proficiency, cultures and thoughts and so on. Accordingly, the author gives some suggestions on the teaching of interactional metadiscourse with the purpose of improving Chinese learners’ English level by raising their attention to interactional metadiscourse.