Analysis of metadiscourse markers in academic written discourse produced by Turkish researchers

Abstract

This study aims at examining the frequency of interpersonal metadiscourse markers inacademic writtendiscourse and investigating the way Turkish writers use interpersonal metadiscourse, namely in MA dissertationsfrom one major academic field; English language teaching (ELT). A corpus based research is applied byexamining a total of 20 dissertations written recently by Turkish writers writing in a second language. Thedissertations were searched for all these expressions and further analysis was made by examining three sectionsof dissertations -methodology, results, and discussion. In-depth analysis based on the use of interpersonalmetadiscourse markers showed that while ‘hedges’, ‘empathics (boosters)’ and ‘attitude markers’ are all used byTurkish writers to a certain extent, ‘attitude markers’ are found to be the most frequent ones. On the other hand,with respect to the use of personal markers, differences were found among the writers. The analysis ofdissertation sections revealed common results.