Metadiscourse in L2 Master’s theses: The impact of academic culture and expertise
Metadiscourse in L2 Master’s theses: The impact of academic culture and expertise

Summary/Abstract: This study explores metadiscourse in English-medium Master’s theses by L2 (Czech) graduates, aiming to explain how Czech students organise their texts, express their stance towards the content and engage with their readers. It seeks to contrast L2 learner academic discourse with L1 learner and expert academic discourse in order to identify differences along the culture and level of expertise dimensions. The corpus-based analysis employs Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal framework of metadiscourse to identify the frequency, functions and realisations of interactive and interactional metadiscourse devices. The findings reveal that interactional metadiscourse is more prominent than interactive metadiscourse in all three corpora and there are significant differences in the realisation patterns and functions of specific metadiscourse markers. The results of the analysis suggest that self-mention, hedges and engagement markers vary along the expertise dimension as they are more heavily used in published research articles than in learner discourse. Cultural differences (i.e., those stemming primarily from different academic writing conventions) seem to affect the preferred degree of writer visibility, as well as preferences for specific metadiscourse markers. Variation in interactive metadiscourse seems to be influenced by text size, genre and communicative purpose. The findings allow for the drawing of several implications for L2 writing pedagogy.

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