Investigating interpersonal metadiscourse markers in English M.A. theses: The case of transition markers
Investigating interpersonal metadiscourse markers in English M.A. theses: The case of transition markers

Summary/Abstract: This study aimed to know which types of transition markers (i.e., and, since, hence, in addition and then) were more frequently used in English M.A theses. To do this study, the researcher collected 30 English M.A theses which were written by Iranian students from Azad University of Kermanshah. Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse was used in this study. Identifying each type of transition markers was used more, the teacher analysed the so-called texts by utilising one of the Cutting-Edge softwares. Next, the frequency of transition markers was calculated by AntConc, one of the simplest and easiest corpus analysis toolkits. The outcome of the study was revealed that 6924 transition markers were found. The transition marker of ‘and’ was the most frequent and the transition marker of ‘hence’ was the least frequent. Furthermore, the results of Chi-square test indicated that transition markers were not equally used in English M.A theses. The implication of the study suggests that using concordance software can make English teachers aware of high-frequency and low frequency vocabularies.

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