چکیده:
Novice academic writers, particularly Iranian graduate students (IGSs), upon entering an academic community, are hypothesized to face probable difficulties in practicing rhetorical expectations set by the experienced (EXP) members, hence, not being able to write in a way acceptable to these professionals. To explore the probable rhetorical distance between them, this study investigated the employment of interactional metadiscourse markers (IMMs) in the writings of IGSs (MA and Ph.D.) and EXP figures in Applied Linguistics. 120 recent research articles (RAs) served as the corpus of the study. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, all occurrences of the five types of IMMs were functionally identified, and compared. To detect any possible significant differences between the corpora, Chi-square tests were run. The results indicated that the IGSs used far less IMMs than the EXP ones in their RAs. However, the general pattern of their metadiscourse use was similar to the EXP writers’. It can be concluded that although the IGSs are relatively aware of general rhetorical framework of the genre based on IMMs, they seem to be far away from the rhetorical standards set by the established members of the discipline. Finally, the possible justifications and implications of the study were presented.
خلاصه ماشینی:
(Corresponding Author) <H4>Esmail Zare-Behtash</H4> Associate Professor, Chabahar Maritime University, Iran, <H4>Mehdi Safaie-Qalati</H4> Assistant Professor, Chabahar Maritime University, Iran, Abstract Novice academic writers, particularly Iranian graduate students (IGSs), uponentering an academic community, are hypothesized to face probable difficulties in practicing rhetorical expectations set by the experienced (EXP) members, hence, not being able to write in a way acceptable to these professionals.
As a result, the present study, with the hope to cast more light on the issue and contribute to understanding more about the Iranian graduate students’ (IGSs) academic writing rhetorical problems, aimed at investigating the probable distance existing between their writing rhetorical features and those of the experienced (EXP) writers through using interactional metadiscourse markers (IMMs).
A major negligence is investigating the possible distance between new members of academic discourse communities and the experienced members who are supposed to establish and develop the rules and conventions for the rhetorical requirements of this specialized language, and behave as the gatekeepers of the scientific communities to ensure that young researchers and novice writers write in the appropriate ways.
In other words, a fairly similar pattern emerged with the employment of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, and engagement markers, with EXP scholars using notably more devices than the IGSs. The obtained results are incongruent with what some previous studies have reported on Iranian scholars’ discourse rhetorical features in that they generally tend to employ fewer metadiscourse markers in their texts than specifically native ones (e.