This study examines the use of textual METADISCOURSE in ELT research articles written by Persian and Anglo-American academic writers. To this end, the introduction sections of 73 English academic research articles were selected. The functional- contextual analysis revealed a statistically significant difference between Iranian and Anglo-American academic writers in their use of iIIocution markers, but no meaningful differences were noticed in their use of text connectives and code glosses. Moreover, both groups of writers used theses markers in the same hierarchical order, i.e. they tend to use more text connectives than code glosses than illocution markers. The results of this study can be helpful in writing instruction, writing skills and translation.

This essay focuses on met discourse, a name for elements of texts that convey meanings other than those that are primarily referential. The essay provides some theoretical background to the study of met discourse, briefly reviews a taxonomy of met discourse, and explores four reasons why the study of met discourse is interesting and important: (a) Such study shows how intricately structured language is, (b) Such study opens up intriguing questions about ethics and language use, (c) Such study reveals differences in how met discourse is used in similar texts in different languages, (d) And such study provides reasons why met discourse deserves a special place in second-language instruction.

This study was motivated by three factors, which also contribute to its significance for today’s academic writing. First, research articles are the significant means of communication between the writers all over the world. Second, persuasion and organization are crucial notions in academic writing where the authors have to consider the academic audiences and their needs.Third, some writers are not the native speakers of English and write their research articles in English. Despite their importance in academic writing, we know little about how textual METADISCOURSE resources (TMRs) are used in different disciplines and genres. This study examines the use of TMRs in research articles of three disciplines of Mechanical Engineering (ME), Medicine (MED), and Applied Linguistics (AL). It also explores distribution of TMRs by native and non-native writers of English in the research articles of three disciplines. Based on a corpus of thirty research articles, the frequency of TMRs was calculated per 1,000 words. The findings of the study indicate a significant difference in the distribution of TMRs in three disciplines and also between the writings of native and non-native writers. In addition, these findings may have some implications for teaching disciplinary communication especially to foreign language learners of English.

In the present study, a new METADISCOURSE typology is presented with ten subtypes: connectives, topicalizers, reminders, intention markers, interpretive markers, hedges, emphatics, attributors, persona markers, and relational markers. The first five constitute textual METADISCOURSE, and the rest constitute interpersonal METADISCOURSE. This study also investigates the impact of language/culture on the use lf METADISCOURSE in the Masters theses of 3groups: native (Iranian) speakers of persian non-native (Iranian) speakers of English, and native (British) speakers of English. The introductions and discussions of these theses were compared for amounts and types of METADISCOURSE used, by means of a number of split ANOVAs. The different groups were found to use METADISCOURSE types differently; more specifically, they were found to use connectives, hedges, attributors, and persona markers differently from one another. This study has implications for a number of disciplines, in particular teaching English as a foreign language.