An Investigation of Metadiscourse Features in International Postgraduate Business Students’ Texts

Metadiscourse analysis reveals the way writers engage withdifferent texts and communicate with each other. Examining these linguistic resources isimportant because they play a vital role in maximizing the learning experiences ofstudents in the Master’s program in Accounting. Yet, there is a lack of researchinvestigating these features in a key topic in the Principles of Finance course:management reports that encompass tables and graphs. This study explores the use ofmetadiscourse markers in three multimodal management reports written by 10 internationalMaster’s of Accounting students. It employs Hyland and Tse’s model and Hyland’s modelfor the multimodal analysis of metadiscourse markers in finance texts. The findings showa high frequency of interactive and interactional markers in the orthographic textscompared with a lack of implicit interactive markers and a high frequency of implicitinteractional markers in the tables and graphs. Implications for the teaching of Englishfor Business Purposes (EBP) are discussed