A Diachronic Study Of Interactive Metadiscourse Use In Chinese Scholars’ English Academic Writing

Academic writing is essential to the creation and dissemination of academic knowledge.It is in academic writing that scholars share their research work with their colleagues and persuade their colleagues that their research matters by establishing the context of their research with the use of metadiscourse,demonstrating the relevance of their work,reporting and interpreting their research findings.Literature review shows that the majority of the studies investigated metadiscourse from a synchronic perspective,and the limited number of diachronic studies focused mainly on metadiscourse in English academic writing by international scholars.To enrich existing research and provide suggestions for English for Academic Purposes(EAP)learning and teaching at the higher education level,this study investigated the Interactive Metadiscourse of Hyland’s Interpersonal Model,in Chinese scholars’ English academic writing in four disciplines,i.e.,chemistry,physics,business economics,and psychology,aiming to answer the following questions:(1)What are the overall changes in the use of interactive metadiscourse during the past 20 years?(2)What are the changes in the use of the five sub-categories of interactive metadiscourse during the past 20 years?(3)How has the use of interactive metadiscourse changed in the four disciplines during the past 20 years?To answer these questions,the researcher built three corpora(a total of 240 English research articles by Chinese scholars),with each corpora containing journal articles published in the year 2001,2011,and 2021 respectively.Each corpus has four subcorpora,representing chemistry,physics,business economics,and psychology,with 20 articles in each sub-corpus.The researcher then used the concordance software Ant Conc4.2.0 to search each of the three corpora for the interactive metadisourse items and checked manually according to the context.The findings show that:(1)Academic writings by Chinese scholars include a considerable quantity of interactive metadiscourse,with a total of 38,820 cases and319.84 occurrences per 10,000 words,and an average of 161.75 per research article.Between 2001 and 2021,the overall trend in interactive metadiscourse usage change goes up,implying that scholars gradually pay more attention to academic writing text organization to interact with readers to some extent;(2)The use of four out of the five sub-categories increased,i.e.,frame markers,endophoric markers,evidentials and code glosses.The use of these four types of interactive metadiscourse resources has increased significantly over the past 20 years;(3)With regard to changes across disciplines,interactive metadiscourse usage in chemistry has changed the most,followed by that in psychology.Academic writing in physics and chemistry used relatively fewer interactive metadiscourse devices than those from business economics and psychology.Moreover,different disciplines showed statistically significant effect upon frequency of all five sub-categories of interactive metadiscourse,although usage of the latter in different research areas varies according to the year.This research explored the diachronic changes in interactive metadiscourse use in Chinese scholars’ English academic writing,and found interesting changes in how Chinese scholars organized their text and guided their readers during the past twenty years.It also highlights the importance of considering how writers organize a text,and provides important pedagogical implications by providing student scholars with text organization strategies to improve their English academic writing,which can lead to better interaction with their readers.