Metadiscourse Markers in a Corpus of Learner Language: The Case of Iranian EFL Learners

Different issues have been probed in learner corpus research since the late 1980s.However, taking the im- portance of meta discourse markers (MDMs) in signposting academic discourse, their use in Iranian EFL learners‟ academic essays is an area of research in need of a more serious analysis. Contributing to this line of investigation, this paper reports a corpus-based study of the use of MDMs in the academic essays of Iranian EFL learners who have majored in English-related fields in Iran. For this, based on Hyland‟s (2005)model of MDMs, the recently-compiled Iranian corpus of learner English was analyzed for in- stances of MDMs and compared with a sub-corpus of the British academic written English. The findings indicated overuse in categories (interactional and interactive) and overuse and underuse in types of MDMs (hedges, transitions, etc.) in Iranian EFL learners‟ essays relative to the English-natives‟ essays, with more instances of interactional MDMs in the former compared with more uses of interactive MDMs in the latter. Suggestions have been proposed for such profiling of MDMs among Iranians as rooted indif- ferences between Iranian and English cultures, previous instruction, and so forth. Implications of the re- sults for English language teaching including explicit teaching of MDMs have been considered.