Parisa Ahmadi - ELT Instructor, Payam Noor University, Ardabil Branch & Ph.D. Candidate in TEFL, Urmia University
Reza Abdi - Associate Professor, ELT Department, Faculty of Humanities, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili

English is the leading medium of communication in academia and publication in international journals presents a goal for some researchers. Metadiscourse is an interesting field of inquiry which is believed to play a vitalrole in organizing and producing persuasive writing, based on the norms and expectations of people involved. It isbased on a view of writing as a social engagement. Recent trends in the study of written texts reflect a growing interestin interaction between readers and writers. Several studies have studied metadiscourse from the descriptive and contrastive perspectives; there is a lack of experimental work on this topic. This study reports a comparative study of interactive metadiscourse markers in quantitative and qualitative research articles in Applied Linguistics to shed somelight on the ways academic writers deploy these resources in a high stakes research genre to persuade readers in theirown discourse community. . Drawing on Hyland s metadiscourse framework, the study examined the use of five types ofinteractive metadiscourse, together with their subtypes, in a corpus of 110 research articles. The analysis suggestedhow academic writers use language to offer a credible representation of their work in different fields, and thus howmetadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities. Frame markers strategy was the mostly occurred strategy in Applied Linguistics. Thefindings are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the disciplines and the epistemologiesunderlying the research paradigms. These findings might have implications for the teaching of academic writing and for novice writers who would like to publish their research in academic journals. This study could help develop a moreplausible academic writing syllabus, which brings less visible rhetorical features of research articles under the spotlight to help avoid possible overgeneralizations from native culture.

Academic writing, Genre analysis, Interactive metadiscourse markers, Metadiscourse strategy,Research articles