Metadiscourse strategies in Persian research articles; Implications for teaching writing English articles

In order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the Persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of Iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. Metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one of the important rhetorical aspects in the writing process, is shown to be susceptible to cultural mentalities. Therefore, in this study an attempt is made to explore interactive and interactional metadiscourse strategies use by the Persian writers in the genre of research articles (RAs). For the purpose of this study, a corpus of 60 Persian research articles from social and natural sciences was selected for a close qualitative manual analysis. It appeared that, though globally similar in many ways, different IMRD sections of RAs which follow different cognitive genre types use interactive and interactional strategies differently. Also, the conventions of the two sciences appeared to be weirdly different. The findings are analyzed and implications are drawn for the teachers and learners of writing research articles in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes. It is argued that without such characterizations it would be very difficult to gather an idea of the current rhetorical trend in Persian language so that a comparison can be made with any target language conventions in teaching and learning foreign languages.