A Comparative Study of Boosters in the Discussion Section of Medical and Applied Linguistics Articles

Abstract

This study tried to investigate the role of interpersonal meta-discourse markers such as boosters. In order to illuminate this relation, 15 medical and 15 applied linguistics articles were selected randomly from around 50 articles. Therefore, quantitative and qualitative methods were applied to answer the research questions to identify the frequency and percentage of booster employment in their discussion sections. Moreover, to determine the supposedly meaningful differences between booster applications in the corpus, the chi-square test was used. The findings showed that there was not any significant difference between applied and medical articles in using boosters in their discussion section. Moreover, it was found that boosters such as it is clear that, definitely, certainly, really, totally, always were the most frequent ones which were used in two groups of articles namely applied and medical articles. Since meta-discourse markers, i.e., boosters play crucial roles in mediating the relationship between what writers intend to argue and their discourse communities, the results of the present study have obvious importance in increasing students’ awareness of the way they organize their writings.