JoLIE 14:1/2021

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THE USE OF METADISCOURSE MARKERS IN THE CASE OF STUDENTS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE IN L2 ENGLISH

Loredana Bercuci

West University of Timișoara, Romania

Abstract

The use of discipline-specific corpora to determine disciplinary writing norms and rhetorical as well as linguistic features is established practice. Several studies have used discipline-specific corpora to establish such genre features and have testified to the efficiency of using corpora in class or for self-directed learning. Few scholars, however, have investigated the discipline of Political Science in this manner. The present study analyses the use of lexical bundles representing metadiscourse markers in the discipline of Political Science. It builds on a previous study (Bercuci 2020) which investigated lexical bundles in expert writing in the field. As I did in my previous study focusing on metadiscourse markers in the discipline of Political Science, to guide my analyses in this paper I use the definitions offered in Ken Hyland’s early seminal work, Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing (2005), as well as his 2008 article, “As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation”. As such, this paper focuses on a learner corpus of undergraduate and graduate student writing in Political Science. I thus reveal the discipline-specific inter-language interference of L1 Romanian into L2 writing in English and indicate the issues on which targeted writing exercises should focus during university-level English for Specific Purposes and English for Academic Purposes classes. Students should be asked to practice register variation through targeted exercises as this appears to be the most prominent case of interference not only of the Romanian language but also of writing norms typical of Romanian research communities in general.

Keywords: Discipline-specific corpora; English for Specific Purposes; Inter-language interference; L2 English; Political Science.

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Acknowledgements

The study is conducted in the frame of the project ROGER (Academic genres at the crossroads of tradition and internationalization: Corpus-based interlanguage research on genre use in student writing at Romanian universities), in progress at the West University of Timișoara, Romania, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (program PROMYS).

How to cite this article: Bercuci, L. (2021). The use of metadiscourse markers in the case of students of political science in L2 English. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 14(1), 7-20. doi: https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2021.14.1.1

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