The present study was an attempt to compare the types and frequencies of the Metadiscourse Markers (MMs) used in research articles published in international and Iranian local journals across the sub-disciplines of Applied Linguistics. In so doing, 512 RAs totaling 3,051,168 words, selected from sixteen international and Iranian local journals across the sub-disciplines of Applied Linguistics were compared and contrasted regarding the use of MMs applying the Frequency Program (Nation & Heatley, 2007). The study drew upon Hyland's (2005) model of MMs. The findings of the study demonstrated some similar and distinct trends in the way the two corpora employed MMs. It is suggested that the observed differences call for raising Iranian local RA writers’ awareness of the principles regarding the conventional application of MMs.

The current study is an attempt to investigate the impact of explicit instruction of metadiscourse markers on advanced, intermediate, and elementary EFL learners’ writing performance. The participants of the study were 94 undergraduate students majoring in English Literature at the University of Isfahan. To elicit the relevant data, participants were given a pretest of writing ability to check their initial knowledge and unprompted use of metadiscourse markers. All the three groups were then exposed to explicit instruction of metadiscourse markers for six successive sessions. Finally, a post test measuring their writing ability with metadiscourse markers in focus was administered. The findings indicated generally that explicit instruction of metadiscourse markers significantly improves EFL learners’ writing ability. It was however unpredictably revealed that learners at the intermediate level improved significantly greater than those at the advanced and elementary levels. These findings firstly call practitioners to pay more serious attention to metadiscourse markers in making EFL curricula. Secondly, they ask for the reinforcement of metadiscourse markers through explicit instruction in EFL courses for the improvement of the learner's writing ability.

Metadiscourse markers help writers make coherent and reader- friendly texts, thus of considerable importance in academic writing. The main aim of this study was to investigate how interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers are used by Iranian EFL learners. An inquiry was carried out to investigate cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse markers in the Discussion and Conclusion sections of the master theses of three categories: native English speakers, native Persian speakers, and non-native English speakers. Following Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse taxonomy, a corpus of sixty master theses was investigated to search for metadiscourse markers. The results showed that native English writers used more interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers than native Persian and EFL learners which might stem from the insufficient awareness of EFL learners of the role of the metadiscourse markers, intercultural differences, and the fact that they do not usually receive explicit instruction on these devices in Persian academic context.

Introduction Hyland (2005) defines metadiscourse as a “cover term for the self-reflective expression used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with reader as members of a particular community” (p. 37). Hyland has admitted that these rhetorical features convey the relation between the writer, text and reader which is more than a pure exchange of information. In this vein, newspapers are important means of information exchange. Readers of any social level in communities have access to it and on the other hand, unlike TV and radio, it would not oblige its users to confine themselves to a specific time or place. Therefore, the role of newspapers in reflecting the news is really significant. In spite of the importance of newspaper discourse, it has not been successful in absorbing researchers’ attention to study on language devices like metadiscourse markers in this type of texts.
Theoretical Framework In analyzing the data of this study, Hyland’s (2005, p. 49) framework was utilized since it is a more elaborated and convincing model for metadiscourse categorization and it has been used in most of the recent studies. Hyland (2005) divided the metadiscourse markers into two broad categories: interactive and interactional, each of which is divided into five sub-categories. The interactive metadiscourse group contains: (1) Transition: expresses relations between main clauses, e.g. in addition, thus, and, (2) Frame marker: refers to discourse acts, sequences or stages, e.g. finally, my purpose is, (3) Endophoric markers: refers to information in the parts of the text, e.g. noted above, see figure, (4) Evidential: refers to information from other text, e.g. according to X, Z states, (5) Code gloss: elaborates propositional meanings, e.g. e.g. such as. The second group of metadiscourse markers includes: (1) Hedge: expresses writer’s uncertainty, e.g. might, perhaps, (2) Booster: expresses writer’s certainty, e.g. in fact, definitely, (3) Attitude marker: expresses writer’s attitude, e.g. unfortunately, surprisingly, (4) Self-mention: Explicit reference to author(s), e.g. I, we, (5) Engagement marker: explicitly build relation with a reader, e.g. consider, note.
Methodology The data of the present study were collected from the leading and most widely read newspapers in the U.S. and Iran by means of random sampling. Random sampling is a contributing factor to overcome the diversity of writers’ styles. The English news articles were retrieved from an online newspaper archive, while the Persian ones were collected from Astan-e-Qods- Razavi library archive. The data sampling was based on easy accessibility, popularity and mass circulation of news articles. To normalize the present study to a common basis to compare the frequency of occurrence, this research employed 100 words approach. In fact, all of these articles were published on 12 September in 2001. All news articles were examined to determine and classify metadiscourse markers manually. Furthermore, to analyze the data statistically, SPSS 18 software was applied. To find out whether there is any difference between the metadiscourse distribution in both English and Persian news and to explore the meaning beyond this difference, the chi-square test was employed.
Results and Discussion The findings revealed that all types of metadiscourse markers were present in both sets of data, but that there were similarities and differences between the two groups regarding their distribution and frequency. In general, interactive metadiscourse markers were employed the most in news reports, in comparison to interactional metadiscourse markers, according to chi- square test results. As for the subcategories of interactive metadiscourse, transitions and evidentials were meaningfully the most frequent markers in English and Persian news reports. Regarding the subtypes of interactional metadiscourse, hedges, attitude markers and boosters were statistically employed the most in both sets of data in terms of frequency of occurrence. Moreover, attitude markers, hedges, boosters and evidentials were used in both groups of news articles to display the hidden ideology for achieving power, but engagement markers and self-mentions were only present in English news reports to show the totalitarian ideology.
Conclusion This study tried to investigate the role of metadiscourse markers about 9/11 news articles published in 2001 in the U.S. and Iran. This comparative study might provide pedagogical implications. It would be practical to train journalism students about using metadiscourse markers appropriately in order to achieve more success in reporting the world’s events. Hence, journalists by exerting metadiscourse markers not only would be able to deepen their readers’ understanding, but also might ensure to conduct them to grasp the content completely and ideally.

Metadiscourse as a key term in discourse analysis involves coherensive and interpersonal features which helps the connection between the text and the context with the aim of communicating with the audience, organizing the text and interpreting it by the audience. To achieve a coherent text in academic discourse, authors should use metadiscourse, its types including interactive and interactional metadiscourse and their strategies appropriately.  So, the nature and the distribution of metadiscourse is of significance regarding their related scientific fields. The present study seeks to explore “interactive metadiscourse” based on Hylandʼs model (2005) and corpus-based approach in the specified instance of Persian academic discourse which is referent researches. Interactive metadiscourse is used to organize the propositional informations of the text with five strategies including transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials and code glosses. The aim of this study is determining and comparing the frequency of occurrences of different kinds of interactive metadiscourse markers in referent researches. Hence, we identified and extracted the interactive metadiscourse markers in 120 Persian referent researches of various scientific fields on humanities, basic science and engineering using Mahak Samim corpus and AntConc software program then we investigated them by manual method too and classified them in five groups of metadiscoursal strategies. Data analysis shows that there is a significant difference in the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in Persian referent researches of three scientific disciplines. This result indicates that although scientific articles belong to a unitary genre (academic discourse), they are also affected by the nature of the affiliated fields. Likewise, surveying interactive metadiscourse strategies shows that only “frame markers” are distributed equally among three scientific fields and the significant differences in the frequency of occurrences of transitions, endophoric markers, evidentials and code glosses among studied scientific fields are confirmed.

Interpersonal metadiscourse is considered as a significant mean of smoothing communication between the speaker/writer and listener/reader. The present study intends to explore the concept and type of interpersonal metadiscourse markers employed by Donald Trump’s campaign speeches as a persuasive strategy. Descriptive qualitative research design is used in the present study. Dafouz’s (2008) classification of interpersonal metadiscourse markers was employed to analyze the gathered data. The results revealed that Trump made use of all categories of interpersonal metadiscourse markers namely hedges, certainty markers, attributors, attitude markers, and commentaries, in his campaign speeches. The frequency of attitude markers and commentaries was more than other types of metadiscourse markers in Trump’s campaign speech, which demonstrates that he attempted to persuade the public to vote for him through making an emotional link.

One of the methods of persuasion in academic linguistic interactions is the use of metadiscourse markers. These markers are a tool to facilitate communication, increase the readability of the text, establish a relationship with the readers and involve them, and avoid rejecting the author's interpretations. The purpose of this study is to explore meta-discourse markers in academic correspondence between students and professors. To this end, 200 student e-mails (13,103 words in size) were randomly selected between 2019 and 2022, and were analyzed based on Hyland's (2005) model of meta-discourse markers with two categories of interactive metadiscourse markers (including transitive markers, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials and code glosses) and interactional metadiscourse markers (including hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions and engagement markers). The relationship between the frequency of either of interactive or interactional markers with one of the Aristotle's rhetorical triangle (i.e., logos, ethos and pathos) (Hyland, 2005) is also discussed. Results show that the use of interactional metadiscourse markers was more than interactive metadiscourse markers in the corpus. Also, the engagement marker as an indicator of appealing to pathos was the most frequently used interactional markers in the corpus. In addition, transitive markers, as an indicator of appealing to logos, has the highest frequency among interactive metadiscourse markers. The results of this study conform to the previous findings that the use of metadiscourse markers depend on the context and genre in which it is used.

MMetadiscourse as a self-reflective linguistic device plays an important role in both making a coherent academic text and interacting with readers. Using a sequential mixed method design, the present study investigated the use of metadiscourse markers in the abstract section of 70 master thesis abstracts written by Iranian TEFL students at the University of Mazandaran. The study further examined TEFL graduated students’ (n=7) perspectives on the employment of these markers in their thesis abstracts. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model, the interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers were identified in the data. Next, the whole corpus was carefully examined word by word to report on the frequency of metadiscourse marker use. The findings revealed that interactive metadiscourse markers were used three times more than interactional metadiscourse markers. Moreover, transitions and hedges were more frequently employed while evidentials, boosters and self-mentions were less frequently used. Findings from the qualitative data collected through conducting email interviews with graduated TEFL students suggested that they had positive perspectives towards the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in contrast with the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in their thesis abstracts. The results of this study can offer a number of pedagogical implications for explicit instruction of metadiscourse markers in thesis abstracts.

This study aimed to investigate the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in 168 comments made by 28 university students of engineering via an educational forum held as part of a general English course. The students wrote their comments on six topics, with a total of 19,671 words. Their comments during educational discussions were analyzed to determine their use of five metadiscourse categories (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions), making up interactional metadiscourse in Hyland’s (2004) model. Following descriptive analysis of the use of metadiscourse categories, chi-square tests were used to investigate the possible differences in the whole sample as well as genderbased differences. The findings showed that although female EFL learners used more metadiscourse markers than males did, the differences were minor and hence gender did not significantly influence the use of interactional metadiscourse markers. However, while male and female participants used all types of interactional metadiscourse, how they used them varied. They used engagement markers and self-mentions more frequently than boosters, hedges, and attitude markers. Since metadiscourse markers play crucial roles in mediating the relationship between what writers intend to argue and their discourse communities, the results of the present study have obvious importance in increasing students’ awareness of the way they organize their writings.

Metadiscourse is a recent theory in discourse analysis in which a writer reveals his presence through different ways in the text to interact with the readers. In this article, we investigated the interactional metadiscourse in Surahs of Quran; Al-waqi’ah, Al-hashr and Ar-rahman based on Hyland and Tse’s (2004) model who divided interactional metadiscourse into: boosters, self mentions, engagement markers, attitude markers and hedges. The selection of these surahs is based on the high emphasis on their continuous reading which shows the significant and prodigious meanings. The method of this research is qualitative and quantitative. The results showed that first, the classification of these verses is superior than the mentioned division. Second, among all metadiscourse markers only boosters, self mentions, engagement markers and attitude markers were observed with different frequencies, so that in Al-waqi’ah and Ar-rahman, the engagement markers and in Al-hashr, the attitude markers had the highest frequency. Hedges were not observed in the verses that indicates the assurance, certainty and accuracy of Quran’s verses in comparison with any other text.