Neda Tavanpour

The present study examined the use of interactional metadiscourse markers (e.g. hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions and engagements) in sport news of newspapers. Interactional metadiscourse refer to the ways in which authors use to engage their readers in the texts as well as to express their ideas about what they are witting. The purpose was to investigate the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in sport news in newspapers written in English by American English native speakers and Iranian non-native speakers of English. The sport news articles were selected from 5 elite newspapers published in Iran (e.g. Iran Daily, Tehran Times, Kayhan International) and in the United States (e.g. The New York Times and The Washington Post). They were matched in the number of words (4331 words) and were then analyzed based on Hyland's (2005) taxonomy of metadiscourse markers. Results revealed that interactional metadiscourse markers were present in the two corpora; however, there were different in the number of metadiscourse markers distributed in the two corpora. In other words, the findings demonstrate that the two corpora were different in the number of attitude markers and boosters. Moreover, hedges were used more frequently in Iranian corpus than the American one. Also, results of statistical analysis indicated that there was a statistically significant difference in the use of hedge in the two dataset.