Cross-linguistic Study on Academic Writings in Creating Coherence Textual Metadiscourse in Abstracts of Master's Thesis

What is essential to academic texts is coherence, which is acknowledged to be "difficult to teach and difficult to learn". Metadiscourse, as features in the discourse which can help readers decode the message, functions in the construction of coherence. This study aims to investigate how coherence differs with cultural aspects and language facilities through the study of uses of textual metadiacourse in the abstracts of master's thesis written by English native speakers and Chinese speakers. The findings indicates that Genre conventions had a determining role in the writers' choice of some metadiscourse resources and lightly more instances of textual metadiscourse were observed in the writing samples of native speakers of English. It also discusses that the differences in the distribution and use of textual metadiscourse resources may be caused by different rhetorical strategies between English and Chinese, the lack of language facilities or the influences of original habits of organizing Chinese.