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It has been established that there are inter-chapter variations regarding metadiscourse use in masters’ thesis. This paper, therefore, investigates the differences and similarities in metadiscourse use between the Introduction and Literature Review (LR) chapters in Sociology masters’ thesis from an English-medium university. The Introduction and LR Chapters of ten theses constituted the corpus for this study. The metadiscursive devices were manually coded, drawing on the modified version of the Hyland’s (2005a) interpersonal model of metadiscourse. It was realized that there are both differences and similarities between the two chapters in terms of metadiscourse use. In the ranking, the interactive and interactional devices, transitions, and hedges respectively recorded the highest frequencies in the two chapters. Besides, there were significant variations across the two chapters in terms of both interactive and interactional subcategories. The findings have implications for the teaching of English for Research Purposes, and the theory of metadiscourse.

Hedging, as a rhetorical tool, has received considerable attention from scholars from diverse fields of study such as advertisement, politics, and religion. Despite the extensive exploration of the topic, it has not received much attention in health communication. Thus, this study, which employs Quirk, Greeenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik's (1985) functional principle for establishing word class and Hyland's (1998) model as frameworks, investigated the various linguistic realizations and functions of hedges in pharmaceutical leaflets (PL), which are also called Patient Information Leaflets. The study, which is based on 50 PLs obtained from some leading pharmaceutical shops within the Cape Coast metropolis and other areas, adopted both qualitative and quantitative content analysis. It was found that pharmaceutical companies employed certain lexico-grammatical hedging devices to mitigate their claims. The study has implications for both patient-pharmacist communication and hedging theories.

For over three decades now, research on undergraduate student pedagogy has shifted focus from an error analysis tradition to an emphasis on learner needs. As part of this shift, we examined the needs of students who offered Communicative Skills in an English-medium university in Ghana, and whether their needs were discipline-specific. Data were collected from two hundred and forty students and twenty lecturers, using a two-pronged sampling method. Major results showed a great need for grammar and writing skills among students, though they held that note taking and note making skills, outlining and skimming be expunged from the programme. The study also indicated that although teachers of Communicative Skills preferred a variationist approach, the reverse was the case among their students. Surprisingly, while students desired to be exposed to modern skills such as CV and Proposal writing, their instructors, on the other hand, were of the view that paragraph and essay development were not so useful. The study, thus, resonates with proclivities for further interventionist methods, specialist instructor (re)training and future research in undergraduate student writing.

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