فاطمه خونمری

Abstract Metadiscourse as an important feature of communication has recently attracted much scholarly attention in academic writing. In this regard, metadiscourse markers are self-reflective linguistic expressions which help writers both make their academic texts coherent and interact with the readers by expressing their attitude and engaging the readers in their discourse. According to Hyland’s (2004) model of metadiscourse in academic texts, the present study,using a sequential mixed method design,aims at reporting metadiscourse markers in the abstract section of master’s thesis in the field of TEFL. To this end, 70 master’s thesis abstracts written by TEFL students at the University of Mazandaran were selected by convenience sampling. To analyze the data, the interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers were identified through a manual corpus analysis. It was carried out primarily to provide a qualitative and comprehensive picture of to what extent metadiscourse markers were used in the specific genre of thesis writing in the field of TEFL by the students at the University of Mazandaran. To do so, the corpus analysis was used for all instances of interactional metadiscourse markers. Then, for the analysis of the aforementioned metadiscourse markers, the whole corpora were read word by word carefully, rather than selecting a number of typical transitions, code glosses, hedges, boosters, etc. Next, their types and frequency of use were calculated. The results indicated that the abstracts differedin the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers. It was also revealed that although students made their abstracts coherent through using interactive metadiscourse markers widely, they offered a slight representation of themselves with interactional metadiscoursemarkers. The findings provide some pedagogical implications for teaching EAP courses and writing master’s theses abstracts.