Metadiscourse in Persian and English Research Article Introductions

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the use of metadiscourse in Persian and English research article introductions in the field of linguistics. The corpus of the research consists of 40 introductions of linguistics research articles, 20 Persian and 20 English. The analytical framework for this study is Hyland's (2004) model of metadiscourse in academic text. In order to investigate the similarities and differences in the implication of metadiscourse (i.e. the interactive and interactional resources) between these texts, both qualitative and quantitative methods will be used. On the qualitative basis, this study identifies and categorizes metadiscourse markers and a comparative analysis is conducted to determine the frequency of different types of metadiscourse. The results are analyzed carefully and quantitatively which include the general distribution of metadiscourse in each category and then the density of metadiscourse in both sets of data. They are scrutinized based on the number of sentences and words in the corpora. The similarities and differences between two sets of data are looked at from a sociocultural view. The results of this study make some perspectives into the teaching and learning of writing for EFL learners.