One Journal, Different Practices: A Corpus-Based Study of Interactive Metadiscourse in Applied Linguistics

• Published in: Chinese journal of applied linguistics Vol. 47; no. 2; pp. 219 - 237
• Main Authors: Lu, Sitong, Jiang, Feng (Kevin)
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 25.06.2024
• Subjects: academic writing; discourse analysis; interactive metadiscourse; language acquisition; research paradigms
• ISSN: 2192-9505; 2192-9513
• DOI: 10.1515/CJAL-2024-0204

Research articles are a primary medium for scholars to communicate with disciplinary community, but there is little evidence suggesting how much writing practices on different research subjects within a discipline diverge in a single journal. This study remedies the oversight by comparing the use of interactive metadiscourse in the papers of on language acquisition and discourse analysis. Based on a corpus of 30 research articles on each research subject, results show that writers in language acquisition make a significantly more frequent use of additive and consequential transitional markers, reformulators, and non-integral citations. However, discourse analysts prefer to invest in exemplifiers, linear and non-linear references and topic shifts. All the differences can be attributable to the characteristics of disciplinary research paradigms, which lead to different knowledge-making and interactive patterns in academic writing. The findings offer empirical evidence to the rhetorical function of metadiscourse in constructing disciplinary knowledge, and raise pedagogical implications for EAP instructors to help scholars in applied linguistics increase international publications.