Engagement Markers for Addressing Readers as Communicators in Academic Writing

Abstract

Showcasing the interpersonal aspect of language nowadays is important for academic writers to establish relationships with their readers, fostering the function of language as a social practice. Engagement is about how the writer explicitly builds relationships with readers through their text. Recently, this area has drawn scholars’ attention, mostly investigating disciplinary and culturally based variances in the use of engagement markers. However, this field still lacks research on identifying a set of linguistic features that are involved in promoting writer-reader interaction. Therefore, the present study aims to explore the forms and functions of engagement markers used in articles published in the Zanco journal. This is a corpus-based quantitative research in which #Lancsbox 6.0 online software was employed to identify the engagement markers used and count the frequency of each one. The study reveals that there is a need for further studies to investigate readers’ perceptions of these identified engagement markers to gauge their rhetorical potency. The findings revealed that Appraisal resources (76%) were used significantly more often than Hyland’s engagement markers (24%), indicating a strong preference for evaluative and stance-based strategies. Pronouns were the most common resource (101), whereas rhetorical questions were entirely absent. The findings from this study can set a benchmark for the pedagogical framework used in improving academic writing skills. The study reveals that there is a need for further studies to investigate readers’ perceptions of these identified engagement markers to gauge their rhetorical potency.