Projecting Cultural Identity through Metadiscourse Marking; A Comparison of Per sian and English Research Articles

Writ ing projects are socially-s ituated identities. therhetorically-loaded aspects of writing, like metad iscoursemarking, are more prone to carry such identities. throughanalyzing metadiscourse strategies employment inpersian and english (as the lingua franca of academicdiscourse community) research articles, th is study makesan attempt to find out whether persian native writers takeon the identity and norms of the discourse community inwriting in their own language or preserve the culturalidentity and norms of their native language. acompari son 0[3 6 persian and 36 english research articlesshowed that, on the whole. the norms of pers ian languagein the use of metadiscourse were different from that ofthe academic discourse community. close r analys isrevealed more similarities in the employment ofinteractiv e metad iscourse used to guide the readers, andsignificant differences in the use of interactionalrne radiscourse that could represent the specific culturalidentity of the persian writers