Examining the Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in Iranian M.A. Applied Linguistics Theses[Latin Thesis]

Mahdi Hasanpour Ghaleh

One of the most salient written academic outputs a university student has the opportunity to create is a thesis which is regarded as “a complex student-produced research genre” (Lee & Casal, 2014). In order to compare the rhetorical features and preferences of distinct discourse communities and evaluate academic writing, a special and long-term attention, on the part of the writers, is required for analyzing the metadiscourse features of the texts (Hyland, 2004). To this end, the present study examined the differences in the use, type, and frequency of interactional metadiscourse markers in theses written by M.A. applied linguistics graduates including 10 males and 10 females from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. This study enjoyed a mixed methods approach which included both qualitative and quantitative methods. The interviewee participants, including 15 female and 5 male M.A. graduates from some universities in Iran, were selected based on convenience sampling. The corpus was analyzed using Hyland’s (2005) interactional model of metadiscourse. The data were explored through a manual corpus analysis method using Adobe PDF reader software. Moreover, a Chi-Square statistical measure was run to examine whether there were any significant differences in the use of metadiscourse markers in different thesis chapters and across different genders. The results revealed that although there were some subtle differences in the frequency and types of these metadiscourse markers, there was no statistically significant difference between two genders in the use of interactional metadiscourse markers. Besides, it was concluded that there was a significant relationship between the chapters of theses and the use of metadiscourse markers. The findings of this study render some pedagogical implications for writing courses at M.A. and PhD levels in the realms of TEFL and ESP.