Writer visibility and reader engagement in university students’ argumentative essays

Abstract

This study investigates interactional metadiscourse markers in the argumentative essays of Turkish and American students. It attempts to find out to what extent L1 and L2 essays of Turkish learners of English show the features of writer and reader presence in comparison with the essays of monolingual American students. Learner corpora consist of 48 English and 45 Turkish academic essays written by first year Turkish university students. These corpora are compared with the sub-corpus of the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Corpus-based textual analysis is carried out to uncover the frequency and functions of first person pronouns, boosters, attitude markers, reader pronouns, directives, shared knowledge references, questions and personal asides. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with 10 volunteer students to gain a more in-depth understanding of their opinions on their own use of metadiscourse items and their general views about selfrepresentation and reader engagement in academic writing. The analysis is done by using the concordance program, AntConc 3.2.4. Additionally NVivo 9, qualitative analysis software program, is used to code the functions of the first personal pronouns and directives as well as the interviews. The results suggest a statistically significant difference between L1 and L2 essays of Turkish students in terms of boosters, attitude markers, directives and questions. There is also a statistically significant difference between the English essays of Turkish and American students with regard to first person singular pronouns, attitude markers, personal asides and questions. Turkish essays have both reader and writer visibility features at the highest level. This study shows that the level of writer visibility and reader engagement of Turkish students’ writing in English is far more close to native English writers than their own writing in Turkish. Textual analysis and interviews have provided evidence for the fact that Turkish students’ writing in English may rely on both their cultural tendencies and English language rhetorical conventions. The results shed light on the interplay of writing instruction, cultural factors and audience awareness.