INTERACTIVE METADISCOURSE MARKERS IN INDONESIAN EFL STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC WRITING

The research on metadiscourse markers investigation in academic texts has grown very rapidly in the last decade. However, research on interactive metadiscourse markers on EFL students' academic writing is still relatively underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to reveal how the competence of EFL students in the use of interactive metadiscourse in academic writing by comparing two groups of students with different grades, third-semester students and fifth-semester students. The research design is a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. A total of 40 students were participating in this research and divided into two groups. Each group consists of 20 students. They were assigned to write a minimum-250-word essay about the importance of English mastery in the disrupted era of 4.0. Around 818 interactive markers were identified in the student’s essay texts. The results reveal that the use of interactive discourse markers in the students' writing was considered still low in quantity. The transition markers were the most dominant found in the text, followed by frame markers, code gloss, endophoric markers, and evidential respectively. Moreover, the students in the fifth semester perform slightly better than their third-semester counterparts at using the interactive metadiscourse markers. However, most of the students in both groups still encountered difficulties to employ the interactive markers in their writing. The lack of practice and the student's native language practice might have contributed to the low quality of the student's writing

Engaging with readers: Students’ metalinguistic understanding of the use of pronouns in building reader-writer relationships

Students’ metalinguistic understanding of the written academic argument is important both to increase writer independence and inform writing instruction. This article draws on a study which investigated undergraduate students’ metalinguistic understanding of the metadiscourse features in their own written arguments. The specific focus of the paper is to determine what metalinguistic understanding students express about the use of pronouns in written argument as engagement or stance markers to build a relationship with the reader. The analysis indicates many students believed the use of reader pronouns were inappropriate in written argument, often because this was what they had been taught. Students’ metalinguistic understanding was shaped more by notions of formality and objectivity than by understanding of how pronouns play a role in reader engagement. The article argues that greater emphasis on the function of pronouns rather than the form, drawing on metadiscourse theory, and on generating metalinguistic understanding of the differing ways that pronouns function in written argument might better support writers in agentic linguistic decision-making

Accountability and the making of knowledge statements : a study of academic discourse

This study investigates the manifestation of speaker accountability in connection with knowledge statements in two different kinds of academic discourse. The study focuses on knowledge statements which feature a set of knowledge stating verbs, namely argue, claim, suggest, propose, maintain, assume and believe. A corpus is used as the empirical basis and a general metadiscursive approach primarily informed by ideas from a recent account of metadiscourse (Hyland 2005a) is adopted (combined with reasoning from dialogic frameworks, e.g. Todorov 1984, Bakhtin 1999). The study falls into four parts: First, the study establishes what it is in the utterance that affects the manifestation of speaker accountability in connection with knowledge statements; speaker accountability is associated with how vocally present or absent speakers are in their texts at the particular point of the knowledge statement, i.e. as connected to the concept of discourse voice. Discourse voice maps directly onto a scalar conception of accountability and a model describing this interactive relationship is proposed. Second, the study investigates differences between the knowledge stating verbs selected with respect to their occurrence in typical accountability contexts (i.e. contexts in which speakers are accountable to different degrees). The result of the corpus investigation indicates that the verbs investigated display significant differences in terms of typical accountability contexts. For example, believe is found to be a typical High accountability verb whereas claim is typically found in Low accountability contexts and suggest occurs as a typical Medium-to-High accountability verb. Third, the study also investigates potential differences in the typical accountability contexts of the knowledge stating verbs across two different academic disciplines. The corpus is divided into two sub-corpora, one part featuring texts from two linguistic journals and the other part featuring texts from two journals of literary theory and literary history. The outcome of the investigation is that there are few significant differences across the two sub-corpora. Knowledge stating verbs appear to occur in similar kinds of accountability contexts in linguistic and in literary texts. Finally, the study addresses the issue of what accountability is, i.e. its status in a theory of language. It is established that accountability can be explained by appeal to social knowledge. Such social knowledge is addressed at the level of metadiscourse in communication. The discussion leads to the proposal of a layered concept of metadiscourse where accountability is claimed to be directly associated with higher-level metadiscourse

Authorial stance and rhetorical structure in English research articles in tourism: a comparative study of international and national Thai journals

This study is a comparative analysis of the authorial stance in English language research articles, written in L2, by Thai researchers and published in Thai journals, with those published in international journals in terms of rhetorical structure and linguistic devices used to express authorial stance. The corpus consisted of 50 articles from international journals and 50 from Thai journals, in the research interest of Tourism, utilizing Swales’ (2004) and Pho’s (2013), Move analysis of a 23-Move structure from Abstract to Discussion-Conclusion. The findings revealed a greater number of Moves and steps occur in international articles than in Thai articles. Based on Hyland’s (2005a) interactional metadiscourse framework, hedges are the most common device used by both groups of writers to express their stances. When comparing both groups of texts, hedges and self-mentions are more common in international articles whereas boosters and attitude markers are more common in Thai articles. There are statistically significant differences between texts in the number of occurrences of all four types of stance markers. The differences in the use of Moves and stance markers between the two groups may be attributed to reader types (national and international), competition in the discourse community, and socio-cultural aspects. This is an area worthy of further research. The findings have both practical and pedagogical implications for academic writing, especially writing for publication

Genre-Based Approaches and the International Baccalaureate Diploma English Exam Paper 2

There are relatively few examples of genre-related text analysis on academic high-stakes English written exams. Of those that are written, discourse analysis and corpus studies are often used as tools to measure genre-related discourse awareness and textual patterns. In Genre Analysis, John Swale’s used text analysis from a rhetorical and linguistic background to come up with a theory of genre based on shared communicative purposes. To large extent genre scholars since then have ignored student reports of how they understand and deal with the rhetorical organization and textual patterns in high-stakes English exams. Furthermore, these concerns have not been studied in the International Baccalaureate English Language and Literature Exam Paper 2. Building on genre traditions in ESP research and New Rhetoric research, this dissertation explores how students report to make sense of high-stakes English exams in upper secondary school. This dissertation aims at identifying some of the approaches that students report to use when engaged in writing expository comparative literary essays. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, artifact analysis and surveys of student rhetorical moves, this study seeks to bridge genre studies traditions that have largely ignored social contexts of high-stakes exams as socially situated phenomena. Findings here suggest that social context plays a significant role in rhetorical development in academic writing. Some findings point out that inter-clausal contexts reflect rhetorical intentions unnoticed in previous studies, and must be considered before quantitative summaries of rhetorical modes can be validated in studies that measure argumentative rhetorical modes. This paper argues that schematic organization of longer expository writing within the overall rhetorical purpose of argumentation needs further examination when considered against task-related influences.Master's Thesis in Education Specializing in EnglishVID-MAUENGENGMAU65