An Investigation of the Use of Interactional Metadiscourse Markers: A Cross-Cultural Study of British and Pakistani Engineering Research Articles

Abstract

This study tries to examine the use of interactional metadiscourse markers by Pakistani and British writers of Civil Engineering Research articles (RA's) from cross-cultural perspective. The current study employed the Hyland & Tse’s (2004) “Interpersonal model” of metadiscourse. For this purpose, we built a corpus of civil engineering research articles contained with two sub-corpora of British and Pakistani RA’s, 45 in each. A mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) research method was employed. Before analyzing the frequency of data, the extracted markers-according to Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy of interactional markers-were checked and filtered carefully through manual examination of the markers into the source texts and the frequencies of occurrences were updated accordingly. The statistical analysis of the data was done using SPSS v.20. A chi-square test was computed and it was indicated that there is a significant difference between both sub-corpora (2 (4) = 16.419, p < .003) in the use of Interactional markers. Taken together, the results indicated that British writers used Interactional markers more than Pakistani writers (351.36 and 240.37 per 10000 words respectively). Pakistani civil engineering writers used boosters (10.3 %) -the only marker under sub-category of interactional markers- with slightly higher rate than British writers (9.6 %).