Interacting with readers: How nonnative authors of English use meta-discourse markers in their research article abstracts published in English medium journals

Abstract

The use of appropriate rhetorical moves (RMs) and meta-discourse markers (MMs) improve the argumentative and persuasive force of academic texts, such as essays, thesis, seminar papers, and articles. However, authors from a different language background and level of expertise may use different RMs and MMs when writing in a foreign language. This study is aimed at describing how Indonesian authors in Applied Linguistics use RMs and MMs in their research article abstracts (RAAs) published in international and local journals. 20 RAAs published in international journals and 20 RAAs published in local journals were chosen for the corpora of this study. Swales (2009) five rhetorical move for RAAs and Hyland's (2005) taxonomy of MMs were used as models in the analyses. The results reveal that different from international journal readers’ expectations, Indonesian authors in Applied Linguistics use only 3 Moves (Moves 2, 3 & 4) classified as obligatory and 2 Moves (Moves 1 & 5) conventional. Also, they use interactive MMs far more frequently in Move 3 and 4 because these two moves are relatively longer than the other three moves. As found in other similar studies, the Indonesian authors use interactive MMs far more frequently than interactional MMs because they concern more of their text cohesion, coherence, and convincing rather than their interaction with the potential readers.