A generic analysis of research article abstracts can cover issues of different types; among them are linguistic features. An integral part of linguistic features of research article abstracts is interactive metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying interactive metadiscourse is the view of writing as socially engaging; specifically, it indicates the ways writers project themselves into their arguments to declare their attitudes and commitments to the readers. This study aimed to explore how interactive metadiscourse markers are deployed by research article abstract writers belonging to different disciplinary communities within the soft sciences, while trying to reach the audience by creating a well-organized discourse. Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse was adopted to analyze 60 research article abstracts written in Applied Linguistics and Economics. Based on the results, there were marked variations found across the two disciplines in terms of interactive metadiscourse markers.

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Speakers use some interactional resources to convey their feelings or feedbacks to the prepositional content and attempt to build personal relationships with the listeners. Two of these resources are attitude and engagement markers and are used to express speakers’ attitudes to preposition and to build relationships with listeners, respectively. This study intended to analyze the use of attitude and engagement markers in native English student presentations. To this end, eleven student presentations were extracted from the MiCASE corpus and analyzed to ascertain the use of attitude and engagement markers using Hyland (2005) taxonomy. The results showed that students try more to engage listeners and build relationships with them to ensure they are attentive and follow the presentations. The most common engagement markers were “you” and “see”. These two markers engage speakers and listeners in an explicit manner. Attitude markers received less attention compared with engagement markers; the most common attitude marker found in the presentations was “interesting”. The results of this study could be included in instructions on how students should use interactive resources such as engagement and attitude markers in their presentations. Keywords: attitude, engagement, student presentations

Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message; it is that which the clause is concerned (Halliday, 1994). One of the themes in Halliday’s (1994) model is marked theme in which there are some elements put in the theme position that frequently indicate notions such as validation of internal evidence; location in discourse time/space and writer viewpoint (Davies, 1989 as cited in Gosden, 1992). Such fronted elements, often at sentence boundaries, commonly have the function of textual organization by signaling changes and turns in real-world and discourse circumstances. This study made frequency and functional analysis of marked theme used in students’ composition writings. This study was carried out on the corpus of 180 compositions come from narrating three pictorial by sixty students- 20 sophomore, 20 junior, and 20 senior- majoring in Teaching English as Foreign Language. Students narrated these stories in three sessions of 45 minutes. The gathered data, 180 compositions, were analyzed in terms of marked theme based on Halliday’s (1994) model of thematic organization. The results illustrated significant differences between the three groups regarding their use of marked theme