A Comparative Case-Study of the Level of Development of Metadiscourse Elements in Two English-Based Undergraduate Research Projects in A Nigerian University

Abstract

Effective writing is recognised through the way writers make use of elements that depict their understanding of the linguistic rules for cohesion, coherence and persuasion. One of the difficulties confronting meaningful written communication among Nigerian students, however, is improper deployment of metadiscourse elements. This reflects at an appalling level even in some academic writings by students of higher education. Therefore, this study investigated two English-based undergraduate research projects comparatively in relation to the level at which some selected metadiscourse elements were deployed.  Four research questions were generated as the focus of the investigation.  Findings indicated that the two sets of corpus examined made appropriate use of the target metadiscourse elements to a large extent. The deployment of self-mentions by the respondent in Data Two in its review of literature chapter led to the recommendation that students should be given appropriate training on how to avoid use of personal pronouns in research reports, while also learning the proper use of the passive voice to convey impersonality.