A Comparison Of Metadiscursive Nouns In Academic Abstracts

In the writing of academic papers,metadiscourse could help authors present their stance and research in a reasonable and appropriate way.Recently,there has been increasing interest in the study of metadiscursive nouns in academic discourse analysis.Metadiscursive nouns create author-reader interaction in a way similar to metadiscourse in the text with interpersonal interaction and textual interactive functions(Jiang & Hyland,2016).However,few studies compared the use of metadiscursive nouns by Chinese EFL learners and international journals.This paper analyzed the distribution of metadiscursive nouns used in Chinese MA graduate students' theses,Ph.D.candidate dissertations and international journal articles,and tried to explore the reasons behind the differences in the use of metadiscursive nouns so as to offer suggestions for academic English writing in Chinese context.In the present study,90 papers were selected from Chinese universities and international academic journals.Three corpora were established,i.e.,Master Academic Abstract Corpus(MAAC),Ph.D.Academic Abstract Corpus(PAAC),and Journal Academic Abstract Corpus(JAAC).Ant Conc was used to identify metadiscursive nouns,and then the data were double checked manually for reliability.Functional classification and the lexical-grammatical structures of metadiscursive nouns were analyzed in this study.The results indicated that Chinese doctoral students used less metadiscursive nouns comparing to the international journals and the frequency of metadiscursive nouns used by Chinese MA graduate students was close to that of international journals.However,the metadiscursive nouns used by doctoral students were more diversified,while those used by MA students were relatively simple.Moreover,there were significant individual differences among Chinese MA graduate students.The reason for the phenomenon may be related to learners' ignorance of the metadiscursive nouns.It is possible that they pay little attention to them,and are not adequately familiar with the structures.As novice writers in academic English writing,MA graduate students tend to imitate international journal papers in thesis writing.In terms of doctoral students,since they have a longer time in the learning of academic English writing,they accumulated more experience in their use of metadiscursive nouns.In teaching academic English writing,it is necessary to increase learners' awareness of different types,functions and lexical-grammatical structures of metadiscursive nouns.