Metadiscourse: Past developments, Present status, and Future directions

Metadiscourse helps shape texts, frames messages, establishes membership in discourse communities, and facilities text comprehension. This review article reports on the findings of the use of metadiscourse beginning in the mid-1980s and, drawing on the findings, advances some research agenda for future. Using three high-quality journals in applied linguistics, we identified 21 research articles to focus our review in the past thirty years. The findings showed researchers used three main frameworks to analyse frequency, structure, and function of metadiscoure, metadiscourse in academic writing differed across languages, cultures, and disciplines, and analysis of metadiscourse was mainly limited to written language. The results also revealed researchers tend to analyse metadiscourse in different subsections of a research article, attempting to establish the relationship between metadiscourse and moves and steps. In the future, researchers may examine metadiscourse markers between native and non-native speakers, in student versus expert writing, and across different proficiency levels. Researchers may also consider using more creative methods, and more sophisticated methodologies, to unravel the complexities of metadiscourse in written, spoken, and digital discourse.