Title: Talking to Students: Metadiscourse in IntroductoryCoursebooks
Abstract: This paper explores the possible role of university textbooks in students acquisition ofa specialised disciplinary literacy, focusing on the use of metadiscourse as a manifestation of thewriters linguistic and rhetorical presence in a text. Because metadiscourse can be analysedindependently of propositional matter, it provides useful information about how writers supporttheir arguments and build a relationship with readers in different rhetorical contexts. The papercompares features in extracts from 21 textbooks in microbiology, marketing and appliedlinguistics with a similar corpus of research articles and shows that the ways textbook authorsrepresent themselves, organise their arguments, and signal their attitudes to both their statementsand their readers differ markedly in the two corpora. It is suggested that these differences meanthat textbooks provide limited rhetorical guidance to students seeking information from researchsources or learning appropriate forms of written argument. Finally, by investigatingmetadiscourse in particular disciplines and genres, the study helps to restore the intrinsic linkbetween metadiscourse and its associated rhetorical contexts and rectify a popular view whichimplicitly characterises it as an independent stylistic device.
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 325
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