A Contrastive Study of Metadiscourse Elements in Research Articles Written by Iranian Applied Linguistics and Engineering Writers in English

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the use of interactive and interactional metadiscoursal features in two disciplines, applied linguistics and engineering. The analysis is based on a corpus of eight research articles from the engineering discipline and eight from applied linguistics. The selected corpus was analyzed through the model suggested by Hyland (2005). Results of the study showed that both disciplines used interactive and interactional features in their research articles. In both groups, writers used an interactive metadiscourse more than an interactional one. Also, there were significant differences on the overall frequency of metadiscourse features as well as on the particular occurrence of some categories in interactive and interactional features.