An Investigation into Metadiscourse Elements Used by Native vs. Nonnative University Students across Genders

The present study has aimed at finding out whether or not students’ language background and gender bring about a distinction between the frequency and types of metadiscourse elements occurring in their papers. To this end, a dataset of 40 student papers in four series written by native male, nonnative male, native female, and nonnative female writers was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the use of metadiscourse resources following the metadiscourse model proposed by Hyland and Tse (2004). The results of the frequency count and chisquare tests (pvalue lt;0.05) revealed more or less notable differences in the overall employment of metadiscourse markers in the two major types of metadiscourse resources (i.e., interactive and interactional) and the categories related to each type (i.e., transitions, frame markers, etc. versus hedges, boosters, attitude markers, etc., respectively) by the four groups of university students.