Interactional Metadiscourse in Turkish Postgraduates’ Academic Texts: A Comparative Study of How They Introduce and Conclude

Vol. 2 No. 3

Year: 2012

Issue: July-September

Title: Interactional Metadiscourse in Turkish Postgraduates’ Academic Texts: A Comparative Study of How They Introduce and Conclude 

Author Name: Erdem Akbas 

Synopsis: 

This study explores interactional metadiscourse resources in master’s dissertations (introductions and conclusions) of Turkish students written in Turkish and English. Interactional resources were identified according to Hyland and Tse’s (2004) framework by using WordSmith Tools (5.0). A statistically significant difference between two groups of writers was found in their introductions in terms of overall five subcategories whereas their uses of interactional metadiscourse in conclusions were statistically insignificant. Further analysis showed that Turkish writers of English predominantly used hedges, attitude markers and self-mentions. It is interesting to note that Turkish writers, while writing in their mother tongue, tended to build a strong relationship with their target readers in both of the sections by employing approximately twice engagement markers compared to their peers writing in English.