Metadiscourse in Written Genres: Uncovering Textual and Interactional Aspects of Texts

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Acknowledgements

Before continuing with the introduction and the organization of the book, we would like to take the opportunity to express our sincere appreciation and thanks to each one of the contributors of this edited volume. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who spent their invaluable time to help the authors and us with their comments and knowledge in relation to the manuscripts. Without their support and experience, it would have been impossible to bring this book to completion.

November 2016, Turkey

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Notes on Contributors

Neda AKBARI has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Canberra, Australia (2014). From 2010 to 2015, she has worked at the University of New South Wales (Australia, 2014) and the University of Canberra (Australia, 2010–2014) as a course convenor, lecturer, tutor, and researcher. She is a professional associate of the TESOL and Applied Linguistics program at the University of Canberra (Australia, 2014-current) and teaches courses related to English for Specific Purposes, specifically Academic Language Development. She also contributes to research on various aspects of second language learning, specifically vocabulary development.

Erdem AKBAS holds his PhD from University of York, UK (2014) and now works at the Department of English Language Teaching at Erciyes University, Turkey. He has participated and presented his research extensively at various reputable international conferences, and published articles in national and international journals/books. He is in the editorial team of Iberica, ELT, and International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature as a reviewer. His research interests include Discourse Analysis & Language Teaching; Written Discourse Analysis; Teaching Academic Writing; Language Curriculum Design & Evaluation; Contrastive Rhetoric.

Sedef ALGI graduated from Middle East Technical University, Department of Foreign Language Education in 2002. Since then, she has been teaching English to different levels of English learners. She was a visiting Fulbright Scholar in Greenville Technical College, South Carolina in the USA from 2006 to 2007. She completed her MA thesis at METU in 2012. Her thesis was awarded being the MA of the year by the Social Sciences Institute at METU. Her area of interests include but not limited to Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Metadiscourse and Writing in EFL.

Betul BAL-GEZEGIN works as an Assistant Professor in the department of English Language Teaching at Amasya University where she is also the head of Department of Foreign Languages. She mainly teaches research methods, language acquisition, material development and methodology courses. She holds bachelor’s and PhD degree in Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University. She obtained her MA degree at Georgia State University, Applied Linguistics ← 9 | 10 → program in the USA as a Fulbright scholar. Her academic interests mainly lie within the domains of Corpus Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, Sociolinguistics, CALL and ESP/EAP.

Mike BAYNHAM is an Emeritus Professor of TESOL in the School of Education at University of Leeds, UK. His professional background is in Adult ESOL and Literacy. Before joining to University of Leeds, he worked in London in Adult and Higher Education and spent ten years in Sydney at the University of Technology, Sydney as Director of the Centre for Language and Literacy. His academic background is in sociolinguistics, but he has always been involved in and committed to Applied Linguistics. He was chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) for the period 2001–2003. He co-convened with Mastin Prinsloo of the University of Cape Town of the International Applied Linguistics Association (AILA) Scientific Commission on Literacy.

Yasemin BAYYURT is a professor of Applied Linguistics at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. She holds a PhD degree in English Linguistics from Lancaster University, England. Her current research focuses on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)/World Englishes (WEs), mobile/blended learning, intercultural communication, and metadiscourse in academic writing. Her publications include articles in various indexed/refereed journals (i.e., World Englishes, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Language Culture and Curriculum); edited books and book chapters published by national/international publishers. Recently she co-edited a book entitled “Current Perspectives on Pedagogy for English as a Lingua Franca” (2015), published by De Gruyter.

Margaret FRANKEN is an Associate Professor and currently serving as a chairperson of a department in the Faculty of Education at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She has also worked as a Senior Lecturer at Massey University for the period of 1995–2001. Her research has included a strong focus on situated learning in particular contexts. This interest has underpinned her writing about leadership with her colleagues.

Jan HARDMAN holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics (University of Birmingham), MSc in TESOL (California State University) and Executive MBA (University of Newcastle). Prior to joining the Department of Education at University of York in 2009, she lectured at the universities of La Trobe (Australia), Newcastle (UK), Birmingham (UK) and University of Technology MARA (Malaysia). Her research interests include Classroom interaction, Discourse analysis, Dialogic teaching, ← 10 | 11 → Language curriculum-based research, Teacher education, Cross-cultural communication.

Ciler HATIPOGLU is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Language Education at METU, Ankara, where she is teaching various Linguistics and FLE courses at undergraduate and graduate levels. Her main research interests are metadiscourse in academic texts, corpus linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, (im)politeness theories, cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. She has published articles on these issues in various national and international journals (e.g., Journal of Pragmatics, System, Studies About Languages, Research in Linguistics) and books. She is also a member of the team that was responsible for the development of the first Spoken Turkish Corpus.

Hale ISIK-GULER is an Assistant Professor at Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Education. She has worked within the fields of socio-pragmatics, discourse analysis, cross-cultural communication and im-politeness conceptualizations in Turkish and published in the Journal of Pragmatics and Intercultural Pragmatics. Her recent research interests also include Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics with a special interest in the discursive construction and representations of gender and the use of conceptual metaphors in political discourse. She is also a member of the first Spoken Turkish Corpus development team.

Davud KUHI is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics in Islamic Azad University, Iran. He has been teaching Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics and Linguistics in this university. He is interested in exploring discourse in general and academic discourses in particular from sociocultural perspectives and has published a large number of articles on such issues.

Liang LI is a PhD student in Te Hononga School of Curriculum and Pedagogy and Department of Computer Science at the University of Waikato. She is also working as a research assistant in FLAX part of the New Zealand Digital Library Project. Her research interests lie in the area of corpus linguistics, L2 academic writing, and CALL (computer-assisted language learning).

Robert MACINTYRE is Professor teaching at a private university in Tokyo, Japan. He has taught English as a foreign language in England, Italy and Japan, and has been teaching at university in Japan for over 10 years. His main research interest ← 11 | 12 → is Metadiscourse and how students in an EFL background use its features to represent their identity in their composition.

Sani Yantandu UBA taught English language at Kano state Polytechnic and Sa’adatu Rimi College of Education, Kano, Nigeria. He later joined the Federal University, Dutse, Jigawa, State, Nigeria. He is now a PhD student at The Centre for Language Education Research, The University of Leeds, UK. His research interests are academic writing and corpus linguistics. He published a number of articles in the fields of EAP and ESP.

Cigdem ULUCAY is a lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages at Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus where she has been working for the last seven years. She holds a BA and MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) from METU NCC. Her main research interests are second language acquisition, academic writing, teaching writing in L1 and L2, and foreign language teaching material development and evaluation.

Shaoqun WU is a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research interests include computer assisted language learning, mobile language learning, supporting language learning in MOOCs, digital libraries, natural language processing, and computer science education. She also explores how to identify important and typical lexical items for language learning from a given corpus by using human language, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval technologies. She has recently co-authored and published on various research areas such as mobile language learning; vocabulary teaching and formal and informal learning for second language writers. She has been involved in Flexible Language Acquisition (FLAX) project.

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Çiler Hatipoğlu, Erdem Akbaş and Yasemin Bayyurt

Introduction

Although there is an argument on how something is said is more important than what is said or vice versa, we believe that the content (what you say) and the way we deliver (how you say/write) it are equally crucial in communication. In line with this, in spoken or written communication, we not only share the propositional content of what we are conveying but we also use language to package our ideas for the sake of helping our audience comprehend things in the way we wish. With the evolution of genre and genre studies, the research into Metadiscourse has attracted a great deal of attention as it was clear that each genre and the producers of these genres followed relatively different conventions, as a part of how something is presented, to guide their audience in perceiving their texts. Coined by Zelling Harris in 1959, the term metadiscourse was used to explain various ways that the speakers/writers package their content to convey what they mean to their audience as they intend to. Metadiscourse can, therefore, be considered as quite important to develop a discourse competence both for the sender and the receiver of the text, which eventually promotes a better communication among participants.