Interaction markers in the written output of learners of English: the case of gender

anonymous reviewers of the article for their constructive comments. Employing stance and engagement markers can clearly indicate writers ’ intentions and opinions in the text. The present study was con-ducted to examine Iranian EFL learners ' use of interaction markers in balancing the reader-writer relationship in their written tasks. This study involved 14 male and 16 female participants, who took a writing task after being evaluated for their language levels. The tasks were anonymously coded and scored by two raters, and a checklist was developed for keeping a record of the frequency of stance and engage-ment markers. The differences between the two sets were investigated by t-test and Mann Whitney U test. The mean age of participants (ranging from 19 to 30 years) was 20.60±1.01. The male and female participants were highly similar in their language levels; however, they had used stance and engagement markers differently, i.e. the frequency of engagement markers (221 cases) exceeded that of the stance markers (99 cases). T-test revealed no significant difference in their using stance markers; however, there was a slight difference in their use of engagement markers. A conclusion is made: the participants did use stance and engagement markers differently. They used the reader-oriented markers more than the writer-oriented markers. No significant difference in the performance of male and female par-ticipants was observed in using stance markers but there was a slight difference for engagement markers