Are They Discussing in the Same Way? Interactional Metadiscourse in Turkish Writers’ Texts

Akbaş, Erdem

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-02526-1_8

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…As shown in Table 1, the sub-corpus of Turkish L1 (Tcorp) writers had 71,581 words, the English L2 (TEcorp) texts had 122,161 words and the English L1 (Ecorp) texts had 102,361 words, making a total corpus of nearly 300,000 words. Considering the fact that since the emergence of the concept of genre there have been many studies (Akbas, 2012;Bruce, 2014;Cakir, 2016;Hu & Cao, 2015;Gillmore & Millar, 2018;Kafes, 2017;Karahan, 2013;Martı n, 2003;Samraj, 2002;Tanko, 2017;Tessuto, 2015) which have looked at the rhetorical organizations of scientiic writing in general or have focused on particular sections of genres (such as research article abstracts, introductions and results), there has been relatively less attention given to the exploration of the nature of discussion sections (Akbas, 2014a;Akbas & Hardman, 2017;Basturkmen, 2009;Hopkins & Dudley-Evans, 1998;Samraj, 2013) in dissertation/thesis writing. For this reason, only discussion sections were chosen to be examined in the present study.…”

Section: Corpus Of the Study And The Research Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strengthening or Weakening Claims in Academic Knowledge Construction: A Comparative Study of Hedges and Boosters in Postgraduate Academic Writing

Akbaş¹,

Hardman²

2018

EDUC SCI-THEOR PRACT

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From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this paper reports on the indings of an exploratory study examining the features of the academic texts produced by three groups of postgraduates: native speakers of Turkish (TL1), English (EL1) and Turkish speakers of English (EL2). To this end, the study involves a microdiscourse analysis of a corpus of ninety discussion sections of dissertations to identify and classify the choices made by the authors for expressing commitment/detachment in presenting knowledge claims. The results indicated interesting similarities and differences across the groups in the ways in which writers qualiied their level of commitment to a higher level and detachment from the claims in their writing. In other words, this can be described as a cline from the highest to the lowest, even intentionally withholding their commitment. By looking at the hedging and boosting devices contributing to the interactive side of academic writing, the discourse constructed by Turkish L1 writers appeared to be slightly less interpersonal but highly authoritative overall. In contrast, the results suggested that the Turkish writers of English were similar to their English L1 counterparts in terms of building a signiicantly more cautious strategy for presenting knowledge claims and making use of relatively fewer boosting devices when presenting their claims. It is hoped that the implications of the indings can be useful for teaching of academic writing to postgraduates within the contexts of the study.

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Section: Corpus Of the Study And The Research Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strengthening or Weakening Claims in Academic Knowledge Construction: A Comparative Study of Hedges and Boosters in Postgraduate Academic Writing

Akbaş¹,

Hardman²

2018

EDUC SCI-THEOR PRACT

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“…For instance, there was not even one instance of the first person singular pronoun in the Turkish texts, but on the other hand, native English writers made their authorial presence explicit with the employment of 'I' in their abstracts, as did TSE. Other studies have also demonstrated that Turkish writers preferred a style in which they downplayed their personal and authorial roles in the discussion sections of their MA dissertations (Akbas, 2011a) and in their introduction and conclusion sections (Akbas, 2011b). In contrast, Turkish writers of English had the tendency, as this study reveals, towards establishing their authorial self by using a quite different rhetorical stance close to NSE writers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Metadiscourse in Master’s Dissertation Abstracts: Cultural and Linguistic Variations across PostgraduateWriters

Akbaş

2012

IJALEL

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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).

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“…Metadiscourse has been investigated in different genres and contexts such as doctoral dissertations (Bunton, 1999), master's dissertation (Akbas, 2014;Akbas & Hardman, 2017), introductory coursebooks (Hyland, 1999), slogans and headlines (Fuertes-Olivera, Velasco-Sacristan, Arribas-Bano, & Samaniego-Fernandez, 2001), student writing (Gardner & Han, 2018) and research articles (RAs) across disciplines (Blagojevic, 2004) and across languages (Akbas & Hardman, 2018;Alotaibi, 2015Alotaibi, , 2016Zarei & Mansoori, 2007). In order to see how metadiscourse differs across academic languages, Zarei and Mansoori (2007) compared Persian RAs to English texts, focusing on two disciplines, namely computer engineering and applied linguistics.…”

Section: Shaqra Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Metadiscourse in Dissertation Acknowledgments: Exploration of Gender Differences in EFL Texts

Alotaibi¹

2018

EDUC SCI-THEOR PRACT

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Metadiscourse, as an important analytic tool, was rarely used to explore the generic structure of Ph.D. dissertation acknowledgments, and within this genre, the role of gender has been unexplored. This study employs interactional resources within the metadiscourse framework (Hyland, 2005) to investigate gender differences in 120 dissertation acknowledgments written by male and female Saudi students at U.S. universities. The results revealed a number of similarities and differences. Both genders employed thanking God, a move that was not detected in English texts analysed by Hyland (2004). The results also showed the absence of hedging devices and engagement markers from all texts. Writers, however, distributed the boosting and attitude markers differently as female writers applied boosters more when acknowledging moral support while male writers used boosters more when thanking for academic assistance, while the opposite occurred with attitude markers. The employment of self-mentions revealed a clearer gender difference as females applied them more with different forms than males did. Overall, the analysis of dissertation acknowledgments using metadiscourse framework showed that metadiscourse boundaries are flexible as they can be adjusted to fulfill the nature of the genre it applies to. Thus, the study recommends that more research should be conducted to investigate different academic genres and part-genres to develop our understanding of the application of metadiscourse. It closes with some pedagogical implications.

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Are They Discussing in the Same Way? Interactional Metadiscourse in Turkish Writers’ Texts

Cited by 16 publications

References 14 publications

Strengthening or Weakening Claims in Academic Knowledge Construction: A Comparative Study of Hedges and Boosters in Postgraduate Academic Writing

Strengthening or Weakening Claims in Academic Knowledge Construction: A Comparative Study of Hedges and Boosters in Postgraduate Academic Writing

Exploring Metadiscourse in Master’s Dissertation Abstracts: Cultural and Linguistic Variations across PostgraduateWriters

Metadiscourse in Dissertation Acknowledgments: Exploration of Gender Differences in EFL Texts

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