While metadiscourse use has been well-attended in second language (L2) writing research, relatively less effort has been made in documenting changing patterns of metadiscourse use among L2 writers. The present study addressed this gap by probing a diachronic change of interactive metadiscourse in research articles published in English Teaching across a span of 40 years. Using the corpus of 931 articles written by Korean L2 writers, we examined whether, and to what extent, interactive metadiscourse use in academic writing had changed over time. Our findings revealed an overall increase in the frequency of interactive resources mainly driven by a significant increase of evidentials. The observed pattern of change in interactives suggests that academic discourse within the applied linguistics community in Korea is becoming more persuasive and reader-oriented over time, consistent with Hyland and Jiang (2018) who reported a dramatic rise in interactive metadiscourse in the global discourse community of applied linguistics.

While the use of metadiscourse in L2 writing has received considerable attention in the past, little effort has been made to examine how L2 writers’ use of metadiscourse in academic writing has evolved over time. In addressing this, the present study explored a diachronic evolution of interactional metadiscourse in research articles (RAs) published across a span of 40 years (1980-2021) in English Teaching. Based on 931 articles consisting of 6.4 million words, we examined whether the use of interactional metadiscourse has changed over the past 40 years. Our findings revealed that there was a global decrease in interactional metadiscourse over the past 40 years. While the frequency and diversity of interactional metadiscourse have slightly decreased over time, the proportion of each metadiscourse category remained consistent. The study further suggests that Korean L2 scholars who publish in English Teaching tend to hedge more than they boost or use attitude markers compared to those who publish in global journals.

Metadiscourse has been recognized as an important aspect of effective persuasive discourse. In this study, we explore how metadiscourse features are deployed by 34 EFL undergraduate students to make their non-discipline persuasive texts effective. We find that students grasp at least some of the metadiscourse resources available to them, but are relatively limited in rhetorical sophistication. In fact, transitions, frame markers, code glosses and hedges were found to be critical elements contributing to student writing quality. The findings also show that both frequency and diversity of frame markers are positive predictors of overall writing quality. We also investigate the linguistic forms of metadiscourse used by the students to project stance in their writing. The students were found to have difficulty handling the range of stance construction they could take, and this was unfortunately couched in single-word modal verbs. Teachers should make the metadiscourse features of persuasive writing explicit to students to assist them in making stronger arguments.