Move Strategies and Interactional Metadiscourse in EFL and ESL Doctoral Literature Reviews: A Corpus-Based Study
Abstract
As a key site of academic argumentation, the literature review (LR) chapter requires writers to move beyond summarising prior studies and strategically construct a research niche through rhetorical and linguistic choices. Accordingly, this study investigates how doctoral writers in EFL and ESL contexts construct LR chapters through rhetorical move strategies and interactional metadiscourse. Employing a comparative descriptive design with quantitative support, the study analyses a corpus of 30 LR chapters from doctoral theses using Kwan’s (2006) move-based framework and Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse. The findings revealed that both EFL and ESL writers predominantly employed strategies that assert confirmative claims about previous research, indicating a shared emphasis on consolidating existing knowledge. However, EFL writers demonstrated greater use of counter-claiming, gap-indicating, and relevance-establishing strategies, suggesting a more explicit effort to justify research niches. In contrast, ESL writers relied more on confirmative reporting of prior studies, reflecting a comparatively descriptive rhetorical orientation. Analysis of interactional metadiscourse showed that evidential markers constitute the most frequent category in both corpora, highlighting the central role of citation in establishing academic credibility. Attitude, hedges, and booster’s markers occurred with moderate frequency, whereas engagement markers were used least frequently, indicating the predominantly impersonal nature of LR chapter writing. Overall, the findings suggest that doctoral writers in both contexts largely adhered to shared academic conventions while displaying subtle differences in rhetorical emphasis. The study contributes to genre and academic discourse research by demonstrating how move strategies and metadiscourse resources interact in the construction of research niches within LR chapter. Pedagogically, the findings underscore the importance of integrating genre awareness, citation practices, and stance management into doctoral writing instruction to support more effective scholarly positioning and critical engagement with the literature.
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