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Contrastive Rhetoric of English and Persian Wri En Texts: Metadiscourse

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Contrastive Rhetoric of English and Persian Wri En Texts: Metadiscourse Contrastive rhetoric of English and Persian wrien texts: Metadiscourse in applied linguistics resear articles Esmail Faghih, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran Sepideh Rahimpour, Islamic Azad University, Qouan Bran, Iran* Abstract e present study¹ examines a corpus of ninety discussion sections of applied linguistics re- sear articles, with the goal of analyzing different aspects of academic wrien discourse. ree types of texts were considered: English texts wrien by native speakers of English, English texts wrien by Iranians (as non-natives of English), and Persian texts wrien by Iranians. In order to understand the cultural differences between Persian and English-speaking researers, the following metadiscourse sub-types adapted from Hyland’s (2004) model were examined: tran- sitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, code glosses, hedges, boosters, aitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions. e first five comprise interactive metadis- course, and the rest comprise interactional metadiscourse. Aer the detailed analysis of the metadiscourse types in question, i-square tests were carried out to clarify the probable differ- ences. e analysis revealed how academic writings of these groups differed in their rhetorical strategies using metadiscourse type because of their respective mother tongues. However, the different groups were found to use all sub-types of metadiscourse. Yet, some subcategories were used differently by the writers of these two languages. In addition, interactive metadiscoursal factors (those resources whi help to guide the reader through the text su as transitions, frame markers, etc.) were used significantly more than interactional metadiscoursal factors (those re- sources involve the reader in the argument su as hedges, boosters, etc.) by both groups. Keywords: contrastive rhetoric, interactive metadiscourse, interactional metadiscourse, applied linguistics resear articles 1 Introduction In the practices of teaing and learning foreign languages, for several centuries wrien language was regarded as being primary; and literature was viewed as an example of linguistic excellence, whi was mediated through wrien language. e elucidation and teaing of rules of language, accordingly, was restricted to wrien texts. In the last two decades, however, interest in the wrien language has been extended to almost all kinds of writing whi are dealt with in the field of teaing foreign languages. Texts, according to Widdowson (2007), are the noticeable traces of the process *[email protected] ¹We would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Avon Crismore and Dr. Robert B. Kaplan for their comments on the earlier version of this paper. 92 of mediating a message. In conversation, these traces are disjointed and vanish. ey can be taped but they do not need to be, and are not recorded. Consequently, texts are produced by participants in spoken communication without making a recording, and their negotiation is regulated on-line. Wrien text, however, is recorded by the writer and is interpreted as a separate process. Hyland (2000:2) suggests that, “the wrien genres of the academy have aracted increasing at- tention from fields as diverse as philosophy, sociology of sciences, history, rhetoric, and applied linguistics.” To clarify the motives of shiing interest to academic writing, he provides us with two reasons: a) from a theoretical perspective, this trend has been prompted by the very fact that it is the writing whi produces different aracteristics of various disciplines; and texts are usually con- sidered to manifest the way of constructing and negotiating knowledge in ea discipline; b) from a pedagogical perspective, he points out that what aracts aention to academic writing is that writing is one of the principal responsibilities of academics. University instructors publish articles, books and resear notes; they correspond with colleagues by e-mail; they submit applications for conferences; they subscribe to different publications; they interact with students mainly by writing; and they develop a field of interest in order to exange their knowledge with other solars and academic communities as in conferences, seminars, etc. In fact academic centers all over the world are usually related to one another through academic communication and cooperation systems. e knowledge produced through effective resear in one institute is exanged within the members of different academic communities in order to broaden the boundaries of knowledge and to inform them of the latest findings and developments; and this is done, mainly by means of academic writings. Although writing is one of the principal responsibilities of academics, and no one can overlook the importance of it in academic life, students of EFL will especially find writing a significant but a more demanding task to master than oral skills (Marandi 2002). is argument will be confirmed more clearly by considering the fact that even writing in L1 is not very easy for the majority of native speakers of any language. Comprehensive instruction in writing and having practice with different genres is important for L1 students and crucial for L2 learners. During their academic life, Iranian students majoring in English are required to produce articles and theses in English; and they are usually assessed mainly through their writings. is is in general possible by teaers providing students with the appropriate language to talk about texts and by bringing paerns and rules of wrien texts to students’ conscious awareness. erefore, conscious awareness of the rules and conventions that govern, for example solarly communication, is a prerequisite for both effective wrien and oral production and processing of academic discourse. One aspect of su language awareness is metadiscourse awareness whi specifically refers to “self-reflective linguistic material referring to the evolving text and to the writer and imagined reader of that text” (Hyland and Tse 2004:156), or as Swales in his book Genre Analysis suggests, metadiscourse is “writing about the evolving text rather than referring to the subject maer” (Swales 1990:188). Hyland and Tse (2004:156) believe that writing is viewed as an engagement between writer and reader whi possess a social and communicative basis; and metadiscourse is related to the “ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their aitude towards both the content and the audience of the text.” Some examples of sentences with different types of metadiscourse are: I shall discuss it in later apters; we shall read in next apter; the reasons for these oices are simple; most of you will oppose the idea that…, etc. e present study, therefore, addresses this neglected issue in Persian and English applied lin- guistics articles by using Hyland’s (2004) model. English texts wrien by native speakers of English, English texts wrien by Iranians and Persian texts wrien by Iranians will therefore be compared as to their use of metadiscourse. Consequently, this textual study takes text linguistic variables into Rice Working Papers in Linguistics 93 vol. 1, February 2009 account and takes its material from two different writing cultures and two languages. 1.1 Baground and related Literature It should be mentioned that there are certain aspects of all discourse studies, su as stylistics, conver- sational analysis, discourse analysis, text linguistics, contrastive rhetoric (CR) and critical linguistics whi also study the traits of spee and writing, among other things, have their roots in rhetoric and fall under this old bran of human knowledge. According to Valero-Garcés (1996:281) rhetoric refers to “the strategies the writer uses to convince readers of his/her claims and to increase the credibility of his/her resear.” ere are two major trends whi retain the term rhetoric in their designations: generative rhetoric whi was developed under the influence of Noam Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar, and the other whi is the main concern of this study, as con- trastive rhetoric (Malmkjær 2004). e study of contrastive rhetoric began in the 1960s by Robert Kaplan’s study of some 600 L2 student essays. He is the well-known father of contrastive rhetoric who developed the idea that language and writing are cultural phenomena and that ea language has its own cultural conventions. e results of his investigation encouraged him to theorize the existence of different thought paerns for different languages/cultures. Sharing a similar assump- tion with the Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis on the relationship between language and culture, Kaplan’s earlier works explored a link between culturally specific logic or thought paerns and paragraph structures in English essays wrien by nonnative English-speaking students. 1.2 Metadiscourse By the early 1990s, linguists had begun to react against the strong emphasis on propositional mean- ing in text analysis. is movement resulted in a range of new perspectives on text, among whi studies of metadiscourse have gained prominence. e term metadiscourse, according to Vande Kop- ple (2002), goes ba to the work of linguist Zellig Harris. Hyland describes metadiscourse as “the linguistic resources used to organize a discourse or the writer’s stance towards either its content or the reader” (Hyland (2000), cited in Hyland and Tse (2004:157)), and Crismore (1984:280) believes that the aim of metadiscourse is to “direct rather than inform the readers.” Some of the major metadiscourse taxonomies that have developed are as follows: Crismore et al. (1993), Hyland’s
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