Interactional Metadiscourse in Thai EFL Student Essays: A Corpus-Based Study
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Abstract
Interactional meta-discourse, including hedges and boosters, attitude and engagement markers, and self-mentions, is a useful device for expressing stance and building relationships with readers. This study investigated the use of interactional meta-discourse in essays written by Thai EFL university students and explored students’ and instructors’ perspectives on its use in academic writing. A corpus-based approach was employed to analyze 60 student essays (30 from a public university and 30 from a private university), comprising 23,061 words (PU = 11683; PVU = 11,378), using Hyland’s (2005) interactional meta-discourse framework. Additionally, in-depth interviews were conducted with five students and five instructors to examine how students use these devices in essay writing and to inform instructional guidelines. The results showed that self-mentions were the most frequently used interactional meta-discourse feature, whereas attitude markers were the least frequent across both corpora. PU students also used boosters more often than PVU students. Interview findings revealed that students used these features according to classroom writing conventions rather than rhetorical awareness, and that instructors provided limited explicit instruction on interactional meta-discourse. These findings underscore the need for explicit instruction and instructional scaffolding to enhance students’ awareness of writer stance and reader engagement in academic writing. Corpus analysis results, integrated with interview data in the Thai EFL context, provide empirical evidence for understanding interactional meta-discourse and offer practical implications for academic writing pedagogy.
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