Contrastive Analysis of Self-Mention as Interactional Feature Regarding Native and Non-native Interlocutors

Many interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic studies have examined how author stance appears in academic texts. Getting the focus of as many people in a community of discourse as possible and persuading them of the authenticity and suitability of the author's statements is one of the main communication purposes of scientific texts. This study explores the discourse functions of self-mentions referring to writer and reader interaction through reviewing previous research articles taking a contrastive analysis in the field of English Language Teaching. It focuses on 50 studies collected by native speakers of English from International Journal of English Language Teaching and 50 studies by non-native Turkish speakers from DergiPark ELT Research Journal, both published during the last five years. The comparison of self-mentions as interactional metadiscourse features in the two corpora indicated that self-mentions were present, but that there were variations in the use and distribution of these features by the authors. Contextual information shows that such variations reflect the different values and beliefs native and non-native interlocutors hold and clarifies that native writers tended to use self-mentions comparatively more than non-natives did. The findings of this study may offer some pedagogical implications for ESP courses and especially writing research papers.