Metadiscourse in L2 Master’s theses
The impact of academic culture and expertise
Vol.18,No.1(2025)
Discourse and Interaction
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova
Tereza Guziurová
Renata Jančaříková
Marie Lahodová Vališová
This study explores metadiscourse in English-medium Master’s theses by L2 (Czech) graduates, aiming to explain how Czech students organise their texts, express their stance towards the content and engage with their readers. It seeks to contrast L2 learner academic discourse with L1 learner and expert academic discourse in order to identify differences along the culture and level of expertise dimensions. The corpus-based analysis employs Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal framework of metadiscourse to identify the frequency, functions and realisations of interactive and interactional metadiscourse devices. The findings reveal that interactional metadiscourse is more prominent than interactive metadiscourse in all three corpora and there are significant differences in the realisation patterns and functions of specific metadiscourse markers. The results of the analysis suggest that self-mention, hedges and engagement markers vary along the expertise dimension as they are more heavily used in published research articles than in learner discourse. Cultural differences (i.e., those stemming primarily from different academic writing conventions) seem to affect the preferred degree of writer visibility, as well as preferences for specific metadiscourse markers. Variation in interactive metadiscourse seems to be influenced by text size, genre and communicative purpose. The findings allow for the drawing of several implications for L2 writing pedagogy.
metadiscourse; Master's theses; academic writing; genre; intercultural analysis
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova
Masaryk University
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova is Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. She specialises in discourse analysis, genre analysis, stylistics and pragmatics, focusing on academic and political discourse. She is author of Analysing Genre: The Colony Text of UNESCO Resolutions (2009) and Coherence in Political Speeches (2011) and co-author of Persuasion in Specialised Discourse (2020). Her recent work exploring English for academic and specific purposes has been
published in a number of international journals and edited volumes.
Tereza Guziurová
Masaryk University
Tereza Guziurová is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the Faculty of Education, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. She specializes in discourse analysis and genre analysis. Her research interests include metadiscourse in academic genres and the aspects of writer-reader interaction in academic texts in general. Recently, her research has focused on English as a Lingua Franca and learner language. In 2018 she published a monograph Metadiscourse in Undergraduate Textbooks and Research Articles in Linguistics.
Renata Jančaříková
Masaryk University
Renata Jančaříková is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Her research interests lie mainly in the area of discourse analysis with a focus on academic discourse and student writing at university level, and British crime discourse and its social aspects. In addition to a number of journal articles, she is the author of Victims vs Killers in the British Press: Naming Strategies in Murder Reports (2014) and co-author of the volume Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse (2012). She is co-editor of the journal Discourse and Interaction.
Marie Lahodová Vališová
Masaryk University
Marie Lahodová Vališová is Assistant Professor at the Masaryk University Language Centre, Faculty of Medicine in Brno, Czech Republic. She earned her Ph.D. in 2024 with a dissertation on requests and apologies formulated by Czech students in English (EFL). Her research interests include pragmatics, focusing on politeness and speech acts, academic writing with an emphasis on metadiscourse, and ESP course design.
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