Abstract
This study investigates metadiscourse in the dissertation abstracts written by Native Speakers of Turkish (NST), Turkish Speakers of English (TSE) and Native Speakers of English (NSE) in the Social Sciences to determine how they make use of metadiscourse devices. It attempts to determine whether student writers from a shared cultural background (Turkish) tend to use similar rhetorical features to those of their mother tongue or harmonise themselves with the language (English) in which they are writing. Metadiscourse as a rhetorical device for the effective use of language facilitates writers in guiding their readers, conveying their ideas, establishing and determining the social distance of the reader-writer relationship, and creating an involved style of writer persona or a more remote stance. In that sense, interactive resources employed by writers help readers to find the information needed and interactional resources convey to readers the personality of the writers and their assertions. In addition, using ‘more personal’ resources is a way of keeping readers more intentionally within the text to interpret what is proposed by the writers personally and to judge them. The overall aim of the study is to compare and contrast 90 abstracts of dissertations produced by native Turkish speakers (30), native English speakers (30) and Turkish speakers of English (30) in the Social Sciences and to consider how writing in English (L2) deviates from writing in Turkish (L1) and becomes closer to the target language in terms of the metadiscourse elements, that is, interactive resources (transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials and code glosses) and interactional resources (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers and self-mentions). 1
Highlights
Frequency of MetadiscourseBefore looking at the individual groups of writers and different metadiscourse resources, I would like to draw attention to the lengths of the abstracts included in the study
This study investigates metadiscourse in the dissertation abstracts written by Native Speakers of Turkish (NST), Turkish Speakers of English (TSE) and Native Speakers of English (NSE) in the Social Sciences to determine how they make use of metadiscourse devices
The same number of dissertation abstracts was included for each group, it was found that the Turkish (L1) writers tended to produce longer abstracts in comparison with the Turkish
Summary
Before looking at the individual groups of writers and different metadiscourse resources, I would like to draw attention to the lengths of the abstracts included in the study. It is obvious that the deviation in the mean scores of the Turkish native writers expresses the inconsistency of writers within the sub-corpus on the length of their abstracts, which ranged from 85 words to 825 words (Mean: 322.83; SD: 132.933). NST writers produced longer abstracts compared with TSE and NSE writers, as Table 1 displays, they made use of fairly low amounts of metadiscoursal items in their writing. Comparison between the three sub-corpora shows that NSE writers employed around 70% more interactional resources (with 32.2 occurrences per 1000 words) than TSE, and twice what native Turkish writers used in their abstracts per 1000 words. In terms of interactive resources found in the corpus of the study, the normalised frequencies per 1000 words demonstrate wide differences across the writer groups. The section will describe whether the differences found in the comparison between the sub-corpora are statistically significant or not, and the level of significance across groups based on the ANOVA tests
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
