A Contrastive Study of ESP Text Books and Content Books for Metadiscourse Markers: The Cases of Psychology, Medicine, and Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate the extent to which discipline specificity of the occurrence of metadiscourse (MD) elements had been taken into account in developing ESP textbooks in Iran. To do so, three distinct disciplines, namely, psychology, medicine, and mechanical engineering were chosen for investigation. For each discipline, two textbooks were analyzed; one content book, and one ESP textbook developed for students in the Iranian academic context. To analyze the six textbooks, Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy of MD markers was adopted. The occurrence and frequency of each type of MD marker in the corpus were then identified and counted by a computational software (Anticon 2.3). The obtained results were further analyzed through SPSS (18) to see if the differences between the frequencies of different types of MD elements in the three disciplines and two textbook types in each discipline were statistically significant. Regarding variations across the disciplines, the results showed that MD markers were used in medicine and psychology texts the most and in mechanical engineering ones the least. As to the differences between content textbooks and ESP ones, the results indicated that MD markers occur significantly fewer in the ESP textbooks than in the content ones in all three disciplines. This may have some implications for ESP material developers to incorporate the metadiscoursal aspects of English in general and those of each discipline in particular into the ESP textbooks.