interactional metadiscourse markers in online forums: a comparative study between native speakers and proficient non-native speakers of english

The concept of metadiscourse has attracted the attention of many researchers in the area of genre analysis in the past three decades. the specificity of every genre requires a particular type of metadiscourse among other factors related to text structure. this, in turn, makes metadiscourse necessary for non-native speakers of english to acquire. in this regard, the present study intends to focus on the genre of internet forums and aims to compare the use of interactional resources of metadiscourse by native speakers and proficient non-native speakers of english. to this end, a corpus of 120 comments posted on www.linkedin.com was gathered. following hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse (2005), the data was analyzed with the help of wordsmith tools (7th ed.) as a concordance. based on the findings, the interactional markers utilized by native speakers outnumber those of non-native speakers. however, chi-square tests did not show any significant difference between native speakers and non-native speakers in terms of using the overall interactional markers or its five subcategories. in harmony with the dialogic nature of online forums, the subjects of the present research utilized various interactional metadiscourse markers. self-mentions were found to be the most frequent type, whereas attitude markers were the least favored category of interactional resources in this genre. enjoying a high level of proficiency in english seems to be the main reason why non-native speakers’ performance in terms of interactional metadiscourse was similar to that of native speakers. it is, in turn, inferred that proficient non-native speakers can achieve native-like pragmatic competence in metadiscourse use. however, metadiscourse use does not solely depend on the level of proficiency, but on a range of other factors including cultural background, generic variations, gender, cross-disciplinary variations, etc.