| Metadiscourse is an important means of facilitating communication, promoting interaction, increasing understanding and interpretation and building a relationship with audience in academic communities. The studies on metadiscourse have attracted much attention of scholars since 1959. However, there is no agreement on the definition of metadiscourse for now. Many researchers use either a broad or a narrow approach in their metadiscourse studies.The definition of metadiscourse in the present study is that metadiscourse is linguistic resources about the evolving text guiding the reader through the text, or about the writer’s assessment on the ongoing discourse, reflecting the interaction between the writer and the reader. At the same time, metadiscourse has the reflexivity feature. Two representative models of meatdiscourse, namely the interpersonal and the reflexive model are introduced. Not strictly speaking, the former belongs to the broad approach, the latter the narrow approach. Aiming to explore the features of metadiscoursal resources in Chinese EFL and L1 English writers’RAs, a combination of Hyland’s interpersonal model (2005a) and Adel’ s (2006) reflexive model of metadiscourse is applied in the present study, under the guideline of Adel’s four principles of identifying metadiscourse (2006). There are two categories of metadiscourse in the modified model, interactive and interactional metadiscourse. The former includes four subcategories, which are code glosses, endophoric markers, frame markers, and transition markers; the latter consists of five subcategories, which are hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self mentions and engagement markers. This study is designed to compare the use of metadiscourse in Chinese EFL and L1 English writers’RAs selected from linguistics journals in ELSEVIRE. Each corpus consists of 40 research articles, with 264,356 words in L1 English writer group (Sample 1) and 239,261 words in Chinese EFL writer group (Sample 2). Facilitated by’AntConc 3.2.4 w (Windows) 2011’, both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to contrast realizations of metadiscoursal resources in these two samples.The statistics shows that metadiscourse is relatively widely used in RAs, with total 21,911 instances (82.88 occurrences per thousand words) and 18,736 instances (78.31 occurrences per thousand words) in L1 English writer group and Chinese EFL writer group respectively. It is found that LI English writers use more interactional metadiscourse (42.78 occurrences per thousand words, occupying 52%) than interactive metadiscourse (40.11 occurrences per thousand words, occupying 48%), while Chinese EFL writers use more interactive metadiscourse (42.05 occurrences per thousand words, occupying 54%) than interactional metadiscourse (36.26 occurrences per thousand words, occupying 46%). Statistics of subcategories of metadiscourse reveals that transition markers rank the highest both in native English-speaking writers’RAs and Chinese EFL writers’RAs, occupying 23% (19.11 occurrences per thousand words) and 25%(19.78 occurrences per thousand words) respectively of total metadiscoursal resources. Also, the realizations and frequencies of specific subcategories of metadiscourse vary in two corpora. It turns out that L1 English writers prefer a writer-reader interaction style in RA writing, while Chinese EFL writers tend to place more weight on guiding readers through the text. Meanwhile, the greater use of hedges by L1 English writers and the greater use of boosters by Chinese EFL writers suggest that in expressing views Chinese EFL RA writers make far greater unmitigated claims and generalizations than their Anglophone peers. Different strategies used to realize these resources appear to be partly influenced and constrained by home culture of the writer.By analyzing the differences and similarities of realizations of metadiscoursal resources in two samples, this thesis aims to investigate how English and Chinese writers interact with readers and guide them through their own texts. It also offers pedagogical implications to help students construct appropriate writer-reader relations in research article writing. |
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