An Intercultural Investigation of Interactive Meta discourse Markers in Research Articles by Pakistani & British Engineers

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the use of Interactive metadiscourse markers in engineering and technological research articles written by Pakistani and British engineers. The objectives of the study were to investigate and to compare the use of interactive Metadiscourse markers between the two sub-corpora. This study has followed Hyland & Tse’s (2004) “Interpersonal model” of metadiscourse. For this purpose, we built a specialized corpus of engineering research articles contained with two sub-corpora of British and Pakistani RA’s, 100 in each. Pakistani research articles were selected from X category research journals recognized by HEC (Higher Education Commission) and Britain papers were selected and downloaded from research repositories published between 2010 to 2016. The corpus consists of 1087091 words.A mixed methods research (qualitative and quantitative) was employed. Before analyzing the frequency of data, the extracted markers (according to Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy of metadiscourse markers) were checked and filtered carefully through the manual examination of the markers into the source texts and the frequencies of occurrences were updated accordingly. The statistical analysis of the data was done using the chi-square test by SPSS v.20. The result of the test indicated that there is a significant difference between both sub-corpora (χ2 = 10.478, df = 4, p = .033 < 0.05.). Taken together, the results indicated that British writers used interactive markers more than Pakistani writers. Pakistani writers used more frequently endophoric markers, code glosses, and frame markers. However, British writers used less endophoric markers, code glosses, and frame markers than Pakistani writers. The only two sub-categories of interactive were used by Pakistani writers with a slightly higher rate than British writers are code glosses and frame markers. On the other hand, British writers used more frequently transition markers and evidential. The result of the analysis shows cultural differences, and it is fascinating that Pakistani engineers used frequently sub-categories of interactive markers in their research articles. Finally, it was also disclosed that British research articles have relatively clear usage of all sub-categories properly as compared to Pakistani engineers.  The study has implications for ESL teachers, novice researchers, curriculum designers, and textbook developers.