The Use of Interactional Metadiscourse: A Comparison of Articles on Turkish Education and Literature

This study aims to determine the use of interactional metadiscourse in articles from the domains of Turkish language and literature. The study employed a descriptive research model to examine 20 articles from the Mustafa Kemal University Journal of Social Sciences Institute (all articles were published between 2010 and 2015 and each has only a single author). Of these randomly selected articles, 10 were on Turkish language education and 10 were concerned with Turkish literature. Hyland and Tse’s metadiscourse model was adopted to examine markers of interactional metadiscourse in all fundamental parts of these articles. For the evaluation of the obtained data, the content analysis technique and the Mann–Whitney U test were used to determine whether the interactional metadiscourse demonstrates any significant differences regarding the domains of Turkish language education and literature. Experts were consulted to ensure the reliability of the research. As a result, this study revealed that there is more use of interactional metadiscourse markers in the field of Turkish language education than in the field of literature, and this difference is significant, according to the Mann–Whitney U test. Further, it was found that hedges and boosters demonstrate a significant difference in studies on Turkish language education and literature; however, no significant difference in the uses of attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions was observed.