A comparative study of Engagement Markers in the Introduction and Conclusion sections of Research Articles written by English and Iranian researchers across Soft and Hard Sciences.

Abstract

In each discipline, academic writing has seen a continuously growing need for courses that are not restricted to teaching and learning vocabulary related to a specific field of study or discipline but rather are expected to equip authors with field-specific knowledge to create reader-friendly and persuasive texts. These texts have always attracted the attention of many linguistic researchers, especially those who have been involved with discourse analysis. Persuasion and readers' involvement, as part of rhetorical features of writing, are mainly achieved by making use of metadiscourse elements in general and Engagement Markers (EMs) in particular. Appropriate use of EMs enables authors to engage their readers and interact with their audience effectively. Despite the importance of EMs in academic writing, no or little attention has been given to how these devices are employed across different disciplines by writers from different cultures. The present study will compare and contrast the use of EMs in terms of type, frequency and categorical distribution across basic science and social science research articles written in English by native and Iranian researchers. For this purpose, the present author will compile a corpus of 80 research articles taken from the disciplines of Sociology, Psychology, Applied Linguistics and Marketing (Soft Sciences) and Biology, Physics, Mechanical Engineering and Electronic Engineering (Hard Sciences). Forty of these Research Articles were written by native researchers and forty by Iranian researchers. Hyland's (2005a) model of engagement markers will be employed to identify the type and the frequency of these elements in the corpus. Since the articles are of different length, the frequency of these elements will be calculated per 1000 words and statistical analysis technique of chi-square test will be employed to examine the significance of difference in their distribution in the articles written by the native researchers and the Iranian researchers across the above-mentioned disciplines.