contrastive rhetorics and the study of metadiscourse in persian native speakers’ and arab learners’ compositions

different studies in writing skill of second language learners show that they are weak in this skill. they know some vocabularies and grammatical rules but are unable to write a different kinds of texts. the study of contrastive rhetorics can help learners and teachers in this area. moreover, discourse markers that indicate rhetoric styles and principles have an important role in writing skill. this article tries to study the type and frequency of markers in 80 descriptive compositions based on hyland`s model (2004) in two groups of learners: persian native speakers and arab speakers who learn persian. the result showed that the two groups use different types of markers in their writings. persian learners respectively use transitions, attitude markers, code glosses, boosters and self mentions more than arabs. however, the more frequent reccurances in arabs’ writings are transitions, boosters, attitude markers, self mentions and code glosses respectively. in addition, the results indicate that persian learners use different variety markers which make their writings more cohesive and attractive.