A Comparative Study On The Use Of Engagement Markers In English Academic Writing Between Chinese Master Students In English Major And Native English Experts

Engagement marker is a series of rhetorical devices that the author recognizes the reader's presence and makes the readers engage in the text.It is an important linguistic feature that reflects the interpersonal relationships in academic texts.At present,the researches on the use of engagement markers in academic writing are confined to the comparisons of various corpora in different cultures,genres,disciplines and so on,which lack the exploration of the use of engagement markers in second language academic writing.Therefore,this paper conducts a comparative study on the use of engagement markers in the Master theses of English majors in China and expert journals written by native speakers to analyze the characteristics of engagement markers in academic writing,hoping to shed light on the teaching of second language academic writing.With corpus approach and text analysis,this study builds two corpora in which 30 MA theses and 30 expert articles in applied linguistics from 2010 to 2017 are collected respectively from Wanfangdata and international journals(such as Applied Linguistics etc.)published.Based on Hyland's(2005)Five Elements of Engagement Markers(reader pronouns,directives,appeals of shared knowledge,questions,and personal asides),this study identifies engagement markers in two corpora,calculates through corpus,and examines results by Chi-Square.The similarities and differences are analyzed and discussed.The results are shown as follows: Among the five elements of engagement marker,both of MA students and experts tend to use reader pronouns,directives and appeals of shared knowledge.However,the total frequency of students' use of engagement markers is significantly less than that of experts,among which the frequencies of reader pronouns and personal asides are apparently different.The use of directives,questions and appeals of shared knowledge in MA theses are not significantly different from those in expert journals generally,but their subcategories are adopted in obviously different frequencies between two corpora.Based on research findings,this paper provides some suggestions to Chinese students' theses writing and teaching of second language academic writing.Instructors are encouraged to guide students to understand and use engagement markers correctly in academic writing,and emphasize the importance of grammar knowledge on engagement markers to help students avoid basic mistakes in the use of engagement markers.