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Although academic writing has been seen as an objective form of writing, recent studies have shown that it is a form of social interaction and not totally impersonal. In line with this view, Hyland (2002) stated that academic writing is also strongly linked with the manifestation of authorial presence across the text. Included in the interactional metadiscourse framework devised by Hyland (2005), self-mentions enable writers to express their beliefs, show attitudes, become a part of the community, and interact with their readers. Consequently, academic texts become more credible, accountable, and interactive by the manifestation of authorial presence through self-mentions. This paper analyses the use, distribution and discourse functions of self-mentions, the we-oriented authorial presence in particular. The corpus of the study consisted of 200 Results and Discussion sections from research articles (RAs) published in the field of engineering and technology, totaling approximately 270,000 words. Both manual and automatic analyses were employed to achieve more accurate results and the verbs most frequently collocated with an explicit authorial we presence were also analysed manually. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses clearly showed that the most frequent function used in Results and Discussion sections in the field was explaining a procedure with 723 instances (54.69%), and that the least frequent functions which writers employed were "describing themselves" and "making a claim/prediction," each with two instances (0.15%). The qualitative analysis showed that writers employed authorial presence to achieve different discourse functions (such as explaining a procedure, stating goals, describing themselves and making a claim or prediction), but preferred to avoid using more argumentative and interactional functions (describing themselves and making a claim or prediction), which can be strongly associated with the purpose of evading interaction with the readers.

With its distinct characteristics, the research article (hereafter RA) abstract has been a major area of interest within the field of metadiscourse. Investigating authorial presence displayed in RA abstracts can play an important role in illuminating the nature of the interaction among the writer, the text, and the reader. This study aimed to shed light on the disciplinary variation on how much, and for what purposes, authorial presence is shown in RA abstracts through the use of the first-person plural pronoun "we" as an engagement marker (the inclusive form) and a self-mention device (the exclusive form) using a corpus of RA abstracts in the fields of Bioengineering and Software Engineering (hard sciences), and Psychology and Sociology (soft sciences). The inclusive "we" was found to be very rare, therefore, the majority of the analysis focused on the exclusive "we." The results indicated a considerable variation across the sampled disciplines and a general tendency to use self-mention when explaining purposes, procedures, and results, but not when introducing and concluding, or elaborating arguments. The findings of this study will contribute to a deeper understanding of the disciplinary variation in the use and communicative functions of "we," which could enhance academic writing practices.

The present study empirically scrutinizes the fixed natural order of grammatical morphemes relying on a manual analysis of an EFL learner corpus. Specifically, we test whether the accuracy order of L2 grammatical morphemes in the case of L1 Turkish speakers of English deviates from Krashen's (1977) natural order and whether proficiency levels play a role in the order of acquisition of these morphemes. With this in mind, we focus on the (in)accuracy of nine English grammatical morphemes with 2883 cases manually tagged by the UAM Corpus Tool in the written exam scripts of Turkish learners of English. The results based on target-like use scores provide evidence for deviation from what is widely believed to be a set order of acquisition of these grammatical morphemes by second language learners. In light of such findings, we challenge the view that the internally driven processes of mastering grammatical morphemes in English for interlanguage users are largely independent of their L1. Regardless of L2 grammar proficiency in our data, the observed accuracy of some morphemes ranked low in comparison with the so-called natural order. These grammatical morphemes were almost exclusively non-existent features in participants' mother tongue (e.g., third person singular "-s," articles and the irregular past tense forms), thus suggesting the influence of L1 in this respect.

Our study examines interpersonal functions enacted through a stance marker in spoken ELF academic discourse. We specifically focus on investigating the functions of "I don't know" in an academic speech event by embracing an interpersonal pragmatics and sociolinguistics perspective to figure out how it contributes to the act of stancetaking as an intersubjective activity. We have examined 14 interactions of doctoral defense discussions from the ELFA corpus. Our detailed discourse analysis of these doctoral defense discussions has revealed five distinctive interpersonal functions of the stance marker "I don't know" allowing speakers to construct their stance and adopt a face-maintaining strategy in the ongoing spoken discourse: prefacing a suggestion, seeking acceptance, hedging/mitigating, checking agreement, and expressing uncertainty. Considering the highly-context dependent and context-regenerated functions of "I don't know," our study attempts to delve into the relational and interpersonal aspect of communication, and thus contributes to research in this strand by disclosing the interpersonal functions of stancetaking as an intersubjective activity with a particular focus on ELF academic discourse.

This study is a corpus-based investigation of how epistemic stance is signaled in medical discourse. In particular, we compiled a discipline-specific corpus of research articles from different fields of medicine ranging from anatomy to endocrinology to explore how particular resources are employed by authors to index their level of (un)certainty towards their propositions. The corpus of the study contained only the results and discussion sections of 100 published medical research articles, totaling approximately 215,000 words. The results of the corpus analyses showed that there was very frequent use of modal auxiliaries by the writers in the field of medicine to express their extra-propositional modality. It was also found that medical researchers did not employ a greater number of boosters to amplify their commitment to the propositions conveyed to the readers. However, the rhetorical uses of boosters were shown to be strategic to portray their higher level of confidence for the sake of credibility and interaction. The findings and implications are discussed with a particular focus on the teaching of writing as a part of English for academic purposes.

The authenticity and familiarity of the reading materials used in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes have received a great deal of attention for some time. The aim of the present study is to report on the qualitative analyses of secondary school EFL teachers' perceptions about the influence of cultural familiarity on reading skills development. With the qualitative nature of the data collection and analysis, a deeper insight is sought into EFL teachers' ideas about the issue with a special focus on the factors affecting their perceptions. The participants were three EFL teachers working in different secondary schools in Turkey. For data collection, in addition to completing prior semi-structured interview forms, the teachers completed posterior semi-structured interview forms after implementing two forms of the same text in both control and experimental groups of students. This also enabled the researchers to zoom in on any possible differences in the teachers' views before and after the implementation process. The results showed that the participant teachers' general perceptions about authenticity or familiarity were neither positive nor negative. Detailed analysis showed that both sides claimed to have some advantages and disadvantages even though cultural familiarity was observed to be favoured relatively slightly against authenticity. Also, each teacher, including the one favouring authenticity, stated that their students were relatively more enthusiastic about participating in activities related to the text familiar to their culture. The lack of sample diversity could be considered a limitation of the study as the number of participants were small and they were all working in the same province.

From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this paper reports on the findings of an exploratory study examining the features of the academic texts produced by three groups of postgraduates: native speakers of Turkish (TL1), English (EL1) and Turkish speakers of English (EL2). To this end, the study involves a microdiscourse analysis of a corpus of ninety discussion sections of dissertations to identify and classify the choices made by the authors for expressing commitment/detachment in presenting knowledge claims. The results indicated interesting similarities and differences across the groups in the ways in which writers qualified their level of commitment to a higher level and detachment from the claims in their writing. In other words, this can be described as a cline from the highest to the lowest, even intentionally withholding their commitment. By looking at the hedging and boosting devices contributing to the interactive side of academic writing, the discourse constructed by Turkish L1 writers appeared to be slightly less interpersonal but highly authoritative overall. In contrast, the results suggested that the Turkish writers of English were similar to their English L1 counterparts in terms of building a significantly more cautious strategy for presenting knowledge claims and making use of relatively fewer boosting devices when presenting their claims. It is hoped that the implications of the findings can be useful for teaching of academic writing to postgraduates within the contexts of the study.

It is now commonly accepted that academic discourses tend to provide venues for participants to interact where the producer needs to display an awareness of the audience, and metadiscourse (MD) is the set of tools enabling the involved parties to establish relationships. MD strategies allow writers to project themselves into their work, signal their communicative intention, influence their readers and align, and distance themselves from cited materials (Hyland,1998, 2005a, 2005b). The problem is, however, that the rules of engagement differ from one culture to another, and from one specific genre to another (e.g., educational vs. professional),and according to Bizzell (1992), academic writers or speakers would not be able to produce texts fulfilling their aims unless they are closely acquainted with the intricate conventions followed in the particular genre by the particular discourse community. The overall aim of researchers exploring academic discourses, therefore, revolves around how such an interaction is built and sustained.

This study explores interactional metadiscourse resources in master's dissertations (introductions and conclusions) of Turkish students written in Turkish and English. Interactional resources were identified according to Hyland and Tse's (2004) framework by using WordSmith Tools (5.0). A statistically significant difference between two groups of writers was found in their introductions in terms of overall five subcategories whereas their uses of interactional metadiscourse in conclusions were statistically insignificant. Further analysis showed that Turkish writers of English predominantly used hedges, attitude markers and self-mentions. It is interesting to note that Turkish writers, while writing in their mother tongue, tended to build a strong relationship with their target readers in both of the sections by employing approximately twice engagement markers compared to their peers writing in English.