Reader-Writer Interaction in Moroccan EFL Undergraduate Argumentative Essays: A Metadiscourse Analysis
Author
Benraiss Khalid
Abstract
This study investigates reader-writer interaction in the argumentative essays of Moroccan EFL undergraduate students through the lens of interactional metadiscourse. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model and a corpus-based mixed-methods design, it analyses the frequency and function of five interactional metadiscourse categories — hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions — in the Moroccan Learner English Corpus (MoLEC), a collection of 185 argumentative essays totalling approximately 44,783 tokens. Quantitative analysis identified 1,363 interactional metadiscourse markers, with hedges (28.0%) as the most frequent category, followed by boosters (23.5%), engagement markers (22.7%), self-mentions (19.1%), and attitude markers (14.0%). Qualitative analysis of concordance lines revealed that these markers serve a range of interactional functions: hedges and boosters work in dialectical tension to simultaneously mitigate and assert claims, while high rates of self-mention and second-person engagement construct a distinctly personal, pseudo-conversational authorial voice. The findings indicate that while these writers demonstrate an emerging awareness of the dialogic demands of academic argumentation, their metadiscoursal repertoire remains relatively narrow and insufficiently calibrated to the rhetorical expectations of formal academic discourse. Situated within the broader literature on L2 metadiscourse development, the study positions these writers at an early stage of disciplinary enculturation and underscores a clear pedagogical imperative for explicit metadiscourse instruction in Moroccan EFL writing curricula.
Keywords
interactional metadiscourse; EFL writing; argumentative essays; reader-writer interaction; Moroccan learner English; corpus-based analysis.
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References
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