Analysis of metadiscourse markers in academic written discourse produced by Turkish researchers
Abstract
This study aims at examining the frequency of interpersonal metadiscourse markers in academic written discourse and investigating the way Turkish writers use interpersonal metadiscourse, namely in MA dissertations from one major academic field; English language teaching (ELT). A corpus based research is applied by examining a total of 20 dissertations written recently by Turkish writers writing in a second language. The dissertations were searched for all these expressions and further analysis was made by examining three sections of dissertations -methodology, results, and discussion. In-depth analysis based on the use of interpersonal metadiscourse markers showed that while ‘hedges’, ‘empathics (boosters)’ and ‘attitude markers’ are all used by Turkish writers to a certain extent, ‘attitude markers’ are found to be the most frequent ones . On the other hand, with respect to the use of personal markers, differences were found among the writers. The analysis of dissertation sections revealed common results.
Keywords: Metadiscourse; interpersonal metadiscourse markers; academic writing; second language acquisition; rhetoric
Keywords
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