Cross-cultural Analysis of Textual Meta-discourse Markers in Dentistry Research Articles

The aim of this cross-cultural study is to scrutinize the textual meta-discourse markers in Dentistry research articles written by Iranian native speakers of Persian and English native speakers. To this end, 40000 words from research articles published in five ISI English and ISI Iranian (Elmi-pazhooheshee) journals were selected and analyzed based on Dafouz’s (2003) textual meta-discourse model with the categories of logical markers, code glasses, and sequencers. Results showed that textual meta-discourse markers are used more in English Dentistry research articles than the Persian ones. Although there are some similarities in the use of meta-discourse markers across English and Persian corpus, inferential analyses display that there is a statistically significant difference in the use of sequencer meta-discourse markers in the two corpora. The findings of the present study suggest that knowledge of discourse is necessary to learn for non-native learners of English.