Metadiscourse In Students' And Published English Research Articles Of Chemistry

Metadiscourse,a significant linguistic resource embodying the relationship among writers,readers and texts,assists writers in constructing cohesive and coherent discourses and improving their readability.It can also help writers express their own attitudes to propositions and audience,show their personalities and finally establish interpersonal interaction with their readers.Therefore,the appropriate use of metadiscourse is coming to be seen as a defining feature of successful writing.The present study is conducted to explore the similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse between student and published writers' research articles.Consequently,students' needs for employing metadiscourse in academic writings are measured and insights into English academic writing and teaching are provided.In this study,12 published English research articles downloaded from SCI journals(78,916 tokens in total)and 24 students' English research articles(78,252 tokens in total)in the discipline of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering are selected and two corpora are created: published research article corpus(PRA)and student research article corpus(SRA).The UAM corpus tool 3.3 and statistical software SPSS19.0 are used to process data and Hyland's model of metadiscourse(2005)is chosen as analysis framework to examine the distribution and the use of metadiscourse in the two corpora.The findings are that: 1)The standard frequency of metadiscourse in published research articles(907)is far greater than that in students' research articles(770),with an extremely significant difference(p=0.000<0.01)between them in the use of metadiscourse.2)Both published and student writers employ more interactive metadiscourse(471 and 499,respectively)than interactional metadiscourse(436 and271,respectively),and no difference exists between them in the use of interactive metadiscourse(p=0.089>0.05)while there exists extremely significant differences as for the interactional one(p=0.000<0.01).3)The standard frequencies of the subcategories of interactive metadiscourse in published articles are in descendingorder: transitions(137),code glosses(125),evidential markers(95),endophorical markers(72),frame markers(41).And the standard frequencies in student articles are:transitions(181),code glosses(113),endophorical markers(85),evidential markers(81),frame markers(39).Apart from other three categories,there exists an extremely significant difference in the use of transitions(p=0.008<0.01),and a prominent difference in the use of evidential markers(p=0.042<0.05)between the two corpora.4)The standard frequencies of the subcategories of interactional metadiscourse in published articles are in descending order: boosters(137),hedges(127),engagement markers(87),attitude markers(59),self-mentions(26).The standard frequencies in students' articles are: boosters(101),attitude markers(64),hedges(60),engagement markers(31),self-mentions(14).Apart from attitude markers(p=0.265>0.05),extremely significant differences between the two corpora exist in the use of boosters(p=0.002<0.01),hedges(p=0.000<0.01),engagement markers(p=0.000<0.01),and a prominent difference exists in the use of self-mentions(p=0.019<0.05).The findings show that: 1)Compared with published writers,student writers generally use insufficient metadiscourse.2)Student writers share similar competence in utilizing interactive metadiscourse with published writers whereas their ability to employ interactional metadiscourse needs to be improved.3)In contrast to published writers,student writers overuse transitions with single form,but fail to pay enough attention to evidential markers which can strengthen the authority of arguments.4)In comparison with published writers,student writers need to develop their ability to interact with their readers effectively with the help of boosters,hedges,engagement markers and self-mentions.It is recommended that: 1)In English academic writing,student writers should pay attention to their deficiencies in the employment of interactional metadiscourse and enrich the repertoire of interactive metadiscourse.2)In the teaching of English academic writing,teachers should carry out purposeful training of interactional metadiscourse and enrich the teaching patterns of metadiscourse resources.