| Previous studies indicate that metadiscourse has its significant impact on the understanding of a discourse and the organization of academic writing. In the existing literature, much of the relevant research is devoted to investigating overall distribution of metadiscourse resources in academic texts, with the analytic corpus being mostly master and doctor degree theses or journal papers. However, few empirical studies are known about metadiscourse use in thesis abstracts. There is much space for us to conduct a cross-disciplinary study concerning Chinese college undergraduates’bachelor thesis English abstracts. Therefore, research is needed to examine the metadiscourse use in bachelor degree thesis abstracts, the result of which may have some pedagogical implications in the improvement of undergraduates’English academic abstract writing.Taking Hyland’s metadiscourse rationale as the theoretical backbone and borrowing its analytic framework as the working definition, the present study, by stratified sampling selection of 200 undergraduates’ bachelor thesis English abstracts from a domestic university (100 from engineering, another 100 from arts) as the data material and employing a qualitatively-based case analysis as well as a quantitatively based frequency method, examines the distribution of interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources and underlying functions in the sample abstracts. A further investigation is made to look into similarities and differences in metadiscourse use between undergraduates’thesis abstracts of Bachelor of Science (Civil Engineering and Electrical Engineering) and of Arts (Public Administration and Mass Media). The purpose is to scrutinize the overall distribution, the linguistic features in terms of metadiscourse devices, and to explore whether the two different disciplines may influence students’employment of metadiscourse in their bachelor degree thesis English abstracts.Results show:(1) Interactive metadiscourse markers receive a larger share of percentage than that of interactional items in both corpora. This may suggest that the proper use of interactive metadiscourse resources could help students organize a logically coherent text, convey their communicative intention; as interactional metadiscourse resources have the function of establishing an interpersonal relationship between the writer and the reader and engaging the reader into the discourse, using them is more challenging for undergraduate seniors. (2) There is no significant difference in the frequency of interactive markers in both engineering and arts groups, except for code glosses. In the two corpora, the frequency of code glosses used by arts students is significantly higher than that by engineering students.This may be caused by cross-disciplinary differences. Our case analysis reveals that most engineering theses are "project designs". Results highlighted in the abstract are more objective and numerically based. There is no need for the students to use code glosses in their abstract writing. Arts theses, on the other hand, are often argumentatively based and organized in "problem-solution finding" pattern. In the arts abstracts, "measures to improve something" or subjective "suggestions" are frequently observed. Therefore, arts students favor to use more code glosses to make their ideas clear. (3) In terms of interactional metadiscourse use, engineering abstracts feature significantly fewer attitude markers, self mentions and engagement markers than arts abstracts do. Our case analysis indicates that arts students prefer using such kind of metadiscourse markers to enhance their own explanations.The study offers evidence that Hyland’s metadiscourse theory with its analytical framework has the explanatory power in analyzing the features of Chinese college undergraduates’bachelor thesis writing. The author of the thesis hopes that the research can provide some references to other related studies in this field. |
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