Metadiscourse in the Abstracts of Academic Writing

Metadiscourse is a very important term in academic writing,rhetorics and discourse analysis. The article applies the classification of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland,and by building two small-scale corpuses,contrasts the native speakers( English) and non-native speakers' (Chinese) use of metadiscourse in their abstracts. The results indicate that Chinese paper writers tend to employ more communicative metadiscourse items to guide the readers a-bout the development of their argument; while they don't have a deep understanding on the function of interactional metadiscourse items.