Metadiscursive Markers in Second Language Theses Abstracts

Abstract

The rhetorical choices in academic theses have attracted many linguistic researchers over the years. Such researches, and in particular, studies on metadiscourse, have been outstanding in capturing the interactive and interactional characters of writers. In this paper, metadiscursive markers in the second language (L2) theses abstracts of five disciplines in the University of Ibadan, Nigeria were examined using Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse. The corpora comprised a total of 75 theses abstracts (15 abstracts per discipline) written in English. The data for this study were manually analyzed and quantified using simple percentages. The analysis revealed the similarities and the differences between the metadiscursive resources across the five selected disciplines. Although the analysis revealed the predominant occurrence of interactive resources, the results further showed a significant utilization of the interactional resources, which specifically engage the readers in the arguments of the theses.