Metadiscourse in applied linguistic research.

Metadiscourse is the commentary on a text made by its producer in the course of speaking or writing and it is a widely used term in current genre analysis and language teaching. It is now one of the most commonly employed methods for studying interaction in written texts. The notion of genre is central to metadiscourse studies as the type of text informs the choices writers make and how metadiscourse items build a coherent pattern of interaction. In this chapter I set out the origins of the term and the various ways it is understood before going on to offer an overview of its main distinctions, assumptions and challenges. I seek to show, through a brief analysis of several key studies, the kinds of questions asked and the methods used to address them. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on future research directions.