Metadiscourse in English and Chinese research article introductions

Abstract

The present study examines the use of metadiscourse in English and Chinese research article introductions in the field of educational psychology. The corpus for this study comprises 40 introductions of research articles – 20 Chinese and 20 English – in the field of educational psychology. Hyland’s (2004) model of metadiscourse has been employed as the analytical framework for the present study. The similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse (i.e. the interactive and interactional resources) between the two sets of texts are looked at from a socio-cultural point of view. The findings of the present study provide some insights into the teaching and learning of academic English writing for Chinese ESL (English as a Second Language) students.