Metadiscourse patterns in academic prose by non-native English writers: A cross-disciplinary perspective

Abstract

This article scrutinizes metadiscourse in English-medium academic prose by Russian writers from two different discourse communities focusing on the ways they interact with the reader and present themselves and their research results. It is assumed that the distribution of interactional metadiscourse elements varies across disciplines. The theoretical basis of the study is Hyland’s (2005) model of interactional metadiscourse which offers a pragmatically-grounded method of studying metadiscourse in academic texts. The study was carried out on a corpus of 156 abstracts derived from two Russian journals in the field of linguistics and computer engineering. The study confirmed Hyland’s findings about research article abstracts in the humanities and hard sciences, though it revealed some distinctive features of English-medium research article abstracts by Russian writers. The findings can enhance English L2 novice academic writers’ familiarity with the academic writing conventions in the discipline.