Endophoric Marker in Linguistics Master’s Theses in English L1 & L2
Endophoric Markers in Linguistics Master’s Theses in English L1 & L2

Summary/Abstract: Research into academic discourse has shown generic, disciplinary and cultural variations in the use of rhetorical strategies. This paper is an attempt to contribute to the study of metadiscourse strategies in Linguistics MA thesis genre produced at British and Lithuanian universities. The analysis has focused on discourse structuring devices, namely, endophoric markers, in 20 native and 20 non-native speaker English texts and found that Linguistics MA theses are characterized by a high frequency of sentence-level markers and low frequency of thesislevel markers. Contrastive analysis has shown that non-native students tend to underuse endophorics, in particular, references to chapters, sections and appendices, but they tend to overuse references to examples. They seem to confuse the terms ‘chapter’ and ‘section’ and overuse vague references, possibly to compensate for the lack of specific references at chapter/section level.

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