INTERACTIVE METADISCOURSE MARKERS IN EFL MAJORS' SUMMARIES IN ENGLISH.

EFL majors' academic training includes the development of academic skills, primarily academic reading and writing, which are important since English majors have to read many books and papers during their studies and often have to write papers on the basis of what they have read. This implies the students' ability to decide which parts of the text are important and will be mentioned in the paper they are writing, as well as the ability to synthesize the material in a reader-friendly manner in accordance with the Anglophone academic tradition, which heavily relies on the use of metadiscourse markers that guide the reader through the text. In order to investigate to what extent EFL majors use interactive metadiscourse markers (Hyland 2005, 2010), which concern the writer's awareness of a participating audience and address ways of organizing discourse, a research study was conducted with 59 English majors in their fifth year (MA level), who read a paper published in an academic journal and were asked to write a 250-word summary. The material was analyzed with the AntConc freeware and the results are used as a basis for pedagogical recommendations that aim at improving students' training in academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]