Exploratory Essay

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Current views of reading regard reading as an interactive process between the reader and the text which results in comprehension. The text presents words, sentences, and paragraphs that encode meaning by activating metadiscoursive skills (Crismore, 1989). In considering the pragmatics of metadiscourse in academic context, Hyland (2010) defines written metadiscourse as those “aspects of a text, which explicitly organize the discourse, engage the audience and signal the writer’s attitude” (p. 437). Hyland (1998) states that: Based on a view of writing as a social and communicative engagement between writer and reader, metadiscourse focuses our attention on the ways writers project themselves into their work to signal their communicative intentions. It is a central pragmatic construct which allows us to see how writers seek to influence readers’ understandings of both the text and their attitude towards its content and the audience. (p. 437)

With metadiscourse awareness and strategies for using it, readers can understand the author’s intentions better (Crismore, 1990). According to Tavakoli, Dabaghi and Khorvash (2010), "they will know whether they are reading the introduction, the body or conclusion of a text; they will know when the author has shifted to a different …show more content…

In particular, through textual metadiscourse, readers can reconstruct the structure of the text, identify the logical relationships in the contents, process the flow of information more easily and can activate their schemas needed to get the meaning. Regarding sociological and pragmatics premises, attention can be drawn to the process of interaction between authors and readers. Accordingly, interpersonal metadiscourse allows the audience to understand author’s implicatures and presuppositions as well as author’s stance while considering the social framework of the speech act (Crismore,

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