A Cross-linguistic Analysis of Interactive Metadiscourse Devices Employment in Native English and Arab ESL Academic Writings

Abstract

This study presents a qualitative, comparative study of interactive metadiscourse in the academic writing of two groups of Native speakers of English and Native speakers of Arabic doctorate students working in the field of linguistics. It investigates the writers’ capability to deploy the propositional discourse and interpretations in a coherent and convincing way appropriate to the projected readers’ comprehensive abilities. A small-scale sample of 80 ‘discussion’ and ‘conclusion’ chapters constitutes this corpus. This small-size corpus aligns with the contemporary trends in corpus-based work in the fields of English where smaller, more focused corpora, which have been set up for a specific research or pedagogical purpose, are much more likely to yield insights that are directly relevant to teaching and learning for specific purposes. Using Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, the discussion and conclusion chapters have been compared to examine the influence of intercultural and local institute academic culture contexts on the writers’ use of interactive metadiscourse devices. The findings revealed a significant influence of the local institute culture on the Arab academic writing in most of the interactive subcategories.