On the afternoon of November 16th 2015, Prof. Lawrence Jun Zhang from University of Auckland was invited to deliver the lecture “Metadiscourse Features in Chinese and English Research Articles: A Comparative Study” at the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. The lecture was hosted by Prof. Ren Wei, and warmly welcomed by the participating teachers and students from the Center and the Faculty of English Language and Culture.
Prof. Lawrence Jun Zhang gave an overview of metadiscourse in applied linguistics and introduced a latest empirical research on metadiscourse features. Starting from the definitions of metadiscourse, Prof. Lawrence Jun Zhang traced the origin and development of metadiscourse, discussed the realistic as well as theoretical importance of research on metadiscourse features, and suggested relevant implications for language teaching and research publications. Current research of metadiscourse had been done relatively thoroughly, but less common in cross-linguistic comparison between English and Chinese RAs. Lawrence Jun Zhang went on to present the latest empirical research “Metadiscourse Features in Chinese and English Research Articles: A Comparative Study”. Through concordances of two parallel self-built corpora of English and Chinese research articles, this empirical study compared the similarities and differences in metadiscourse features between English corpus and Chinese corpus in an attempt to see how metadiscourse contributed to knowledge construction in applied linguistics research articles. Research results indicated that, both English and Chinese research articles frequently used transitions, interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse. However, the frequency of interactional metadiscourse was significantly greater in English research articles than in the Chinese counterpart. In addition, English research articles used more metadiscourse resources to organize their ideas and interact more with their imagined audience than Chinese research articles did.
Although the discussion lasted only about one hour, all the participants, who were greatly impressed, interacted actively with Prof. Lawrence Jun Zhang. The discussion deepened their understanding of issues relating to metadiscourse and how to submit English articles internationally.
