Metadiscourse use in thesis abstracts: A cross-cultural study

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate cultural variations in the use of metadiscourse between Turkish and USA postgraduate students' abstracts in MA thesis written in English. The taxonomy was borrowed from Hyland (2005). The corpora in the present study comprise a total of 52 thesis abstracts written in English from the department of English Language Teaching, 26 thesis from USA students and 26 from Turkish students. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to analyse the texts in the corpora. The analysis revealed that there were some cultural differences in the amounts and types of metadiscourse. The incidence of evidential, endophorics, code glosses, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions were fewer in Turkish students' master thesis abstracts. However, Turkish students used metadiscourse transitions, frame markers and hedges more than USA students. Pedagogical implications were provided in light of empirical data. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of WCLTA 2013.