Metadiscourse in the Introductions of Postgraduate Dissertations: A Comparative Study of Pakistani Non-Native and American Native Writers

Abstract

This study examines how Pakistani non-native English-speaking students (PNNS) and American native English-speaking students (ANS) use metadiscourse in the introductory sections of their postgraduate dissertations. The corpus consists of thirty dissertation introductions drawn from Pakistani and American universities across three academic registers engineering, linguistics, and social sciences spanning the publication years 2017 to 2021. Following Hyland’s (2005a) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, every text was coded for the interactional resources writers use to engage their readers: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mention, reader references, and directives. A two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), with register and year entered as fixed factors, was used to test for differences in how these markers were distributed across the corpus, supplemented by partial eta-squared for effect size and Cohen’s d for post hoc comparisons. The results show a significant interaction between year and register in the use of boosters and reader markers, a significant main effect of year on reader markers, and significant main effects of register on hedges, attitude markers, reader markers, and directives. Engineering texts consistently used fewer hedges but more reader references and directives than linguistics or social science texts, indicating that disciplinary convention shapes interactional metadiscourse more strongly than nationality or first-language background alone. The findings are discussed in relation to voice construction in second-language academic writing, with implications for how postgraduate writing is taught to non-native English speakers.