A contrastive analysis of metadiscourse patterns in academic texts by non-native authors

Resumen

The study aims to explore differences in the use of metadiscourse by non-native academic writers with three different cultural backgrounds. Article abstracts by Latin American, Asian and East European scholars were taken for the analysis of metadiscourse devices. The theoretical framework of the study is Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy of metadiscourse. The study revealed that East European academic prose contained considerably more hedges and attitude markers than those written by Asian and Latin American authors. East European writers seemed to be more careful in making claims and often emphasized interesting, crucial or debatable findings. In the Latin American and Asian sub-corpora, more boosters used to demonstrate confidence were found. Unlike the East European corpus, the Asian and Latin American corpora contained self-mentions employed to emphasize the importance of authorial claims. The results confirmed the assumption that metadiscourse is based on different academic writing styles and traditions, which appear to vary across cultures.