Metadiscourse in results and discussion chapters: A cross-linguistic analysis of English and Spanish thesis writers in engineering

A Cross-linguistic Analysis of Interactive Metadiscourse Devices Employment in Native English and Arab ESL Academic Writings

“…Table 2 illustrates the vital role of meta-discourse markers in empowering the writer to deploy the propositional discourse and its interpretations in a coherent and convincing way appropriate to that of the projected discourse. It also indicates that both corpora contain more interactive metadiscourse (50.83%; 57.57%) than interpersonal markers (49.17%; 42.43%) respectively, which is consistent with previous studies investigating met discourse use in theses and dissertations (see Hyland, 2004;Lee & Casal, 2014). The results of the analysis of the two corpora indicate that writers in both the groups are similar in using transition markers and Frame Markers in both corpora as shown in Table 3.…”

“…The high frequency use of transition markers by NE and Arab ESL writers in this study echoes with the findings of interactive metadiscourse markers used by Hong Kong Chinese academic dissertations (Hyland, 2004) and with Spanish language theses (Lee & Casal, 2014). However, the remaining interactive categories vary in the frequency of their use in these three studies of graduate students' dissertations, as shown in Table 4.…”

“…The findings indicate a difference in evidential use by writers in both corpora. As shown in Table 7, the English corpora used twice as many evidentials as the Arabic writers (65.86 to 38.68 per 10,000 words), in explaining the findings and in justifying their claims and conclusions by establishing more rigorous intertextual support with previous research represented in the previous chapters of their dissertations and theses (Hyland, 2004;Lee & Casal, 2014). …”

“…These findings also show English writers' preference for a progressive style over the retrogressive style previously used, one that employs more additive devices than comparative and consequence devices. Arab writers also employed the same progressive style over the retrogressive style with approximately the same ratio (2:1) as a result of using the same writing genre to meet the demands of their departmental, institutional, field micro-communities (Lee & Casal, 2014;Roberts & Cimasko, 2008;Li & Wharton, 2012). Differences in the frequency use of these transition devices in these three sub-categories are to be attributed to divergent degrees of experience in composing research genres between the writers in the two corpora and between novice and expert L2 writers in the ArbWDCs group (Hyland, 2008).…”

“…Students in general strive to demonstrating their competence in conducting original research, presenting pertinent knowledge of research field literature and producing high-quality writing in the form of theses or dissertations to meet the demands of their departmental, institutional, and later, field micro-communities (Lee & Casal, 2014;Roberts & Cimasko, 2008;Li & Wharton, 2012). Theses and dissertations are distinctive genres due to their differing purpose, rhetorical structures, and immediate reader expectations (Thompson, 2013).…”