Are They Discussing in the Same Way? Interactional Metadiscourse in Turkish Writers’ Texts

Abstract

A number of linguistic devices used by writers to reify interaction between themselves and their intended audiences. This obviously includes explicit use of particular stance and engagement markers in different contexts depending on the language or the cultural background of writers. For instance, a great deal of research reveals that the custom of Anglo-Saxon academic writing style puts an emphasis on the interactive nature of their texts. Other cultures and languages might represent distinct way of organising and embodying interaction in their texts. However, there are some contradictory views claiming that the nature of academic discourse is pretty much global (Widdowson 1979) or different cultural values are attached to the oveall academic discourse and its structures by different cultures (Kaplan 1966). Considering them in mind, an explatory study looking at writers from same cultural background was carried out. This small-scale study investigates interactional metadiscourse in the rhetorically forceful section of dissertations written by Turkish writers in Turkish and English. Corpora in each language were created by choosing a representative sample of two sets of ten discussion sections from MA dissertations in education, and each corpus was explored in terms of interpersonality using Hyland and Tse’s (2004) framework. The analysis demonstrates that there were some similarities and statistically significant differences between the two corpora in terms of the employment of interactional metadiscourse. One of the most striking differences was the use of Self Mentions. That category was not found in the native Turkish students’ texts. It seemed that native Turkish writers did not clearly point their authorial identity in order to produce a more objective discourse no matter how much their discussions were based on their subjective evaluations on the findings of their research. In contrast, Turkish writers of English enhanced their authorial involvement with the greater use of Self Mentions to highlight their personal intrusion and contribution to overall discourse. The differences were attributable to the language in which the students wrote, however, most of the pronounced similarities in the study were due the fact that the Turkish writers were following their native language and culture at some points even when they were writing in English. That confirms the idea claimed by Kaplan (1966) which is about the tendency of L2 student writer’s trace of their cultural conventions and rhetorical strategies of their native tongue, and contradicts with Widdowson (1979).