Promoting the Status of an Academic Language: Participant Interaction

Abstract

This study investigates the distribution of forms and functions of metadiscursive devices in research articles (RAs) in Persian across three academic disciplines (i.e., Sociology, Education, and Medicine) and compares the results with English and Spanish RAs. Data consist of 36 research articles, 12 in each discipline, resulting in 100,677 words (Sociology = 44,942, Education = 38,169, and Medicine =17,566). The sample RAs were chosen based on the taxonomy of disciplines, ranking of the journals, empirical nature of the articles, and their publication date. The reflexive model of metadiscourse (Adel A, Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. John Benjamins Publishing, 2006) was used in order to determine and classify the metadiscourse markers in terms of both form and function. This resulted in a total of 1001 tokens in the three disciplines. Findings showed that the RAs in Sociology and Education have higher density in terms of metadiscourse markers than RAs in Medicine. Further examination of the results showed that the ratio of using Personal to Impersonal metadiscursive devices in Persian was one to ten, which is strikingly different from both English and Spanish. The authors suggest that, in order for academic Persian to establish its position as an effective and persuasive language in a larger academic community, it should show more participant interaction and writer-reader involvement. Finally, it is emphasized that linguistic policies of academic Persian should be implemented in a way that they direct it towards a more writer-responsible language along the writer-reader responsibility continuum.