A Metadiscourse Analysis over Interactive VS Interactional Resources within English Academic Articles in Arts and Humanities

In this article, researchers set out to discover the metadiscourse markers in research articles written by both native and non-native English speakers. To this end, a total number of twenty research articles published by Iranian and native English speakers in highly reputed journals on Arts and Humanities domains were randomly selected from major databases including Science Direct, Noormagz, and Magiran. Through Hylands’ Metadiscoursal model (2005), appraisals were accomplished on two main metadiscoursal aspects including interactive vs. interactional resources. The results revealed that interactive resources had the highest proportion in comparison with interactional resources with transitions being in the top list in both native and non-native articles considering different parts of the articles from abstract up to the conclusion part. From among interactional resources, in articles written by native English speakers, attitude markers and for the non-native ones, engagement markers had the least rates. In addition, Iranian scholars had used some markers e.g. ‘attitude markers’, and ‘hedges’ more than native English speakers. It can be included that students should be informed about a balanced use of the frequency and the percentage of different metadiscourse markers in English as a part of teaching writing or grammar in their research writing modules.