Interpersonality Strategies in International Student Handbooks Written by Native Speakers of English (NSE) and Non-native Speakers of English (NNSE)

Summary of the doctoral dissertation Interpersonality Strategies in International Student Handbooks Written by Native Speakers of English (NSE) and Non-native Speakers of English (NNSE) Tesis doctoral presentada por: Stan McDaniel Mann Valencia, 2014 Have you ever read a brochure or handbook written in English by a non-native speaker of English (NNSE), noticed that the grammar and syntax was excellent and the terminology was near-perfect, but you still did not understand the essence of what the author was trying to communicate, or you had the feeling that the information was ambiguous? It was precisely for these two reasons that this research on interpersonality strategies was carried out. Through this analysis it is hoped to contribute to explaining why international student handbooks written by NNSE do not persuade effectively enough and do not establish a proper writer-reader relationship, which are precisely two of the main goals of interpersonality. Interpersonality is also referred to as interactional metadiscourse or interpersonal metadiscourse, and all three terms are used interchangeably throughout this study. Since the term metadiscourse was coined over 50 years ago, the definitions for it have continuously evolved. Metadiscourse may be broadly described as overtly expressing the writer´s acknowledgement of the reader (Dahl, 2004, p. 1811). There are two classifications of metadiscourse, textual metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse. For this study, interactional metadiscourse has been chosen due to its focus on establishing a close writer-reader relationship. Hyland and Tse´s (2004) model of analysis proved to be the most reliable for this study due to the fact that it was the first classification of interactional metadiscourse markers with 5 main interactional metadiscourse categories: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions, each category with its corresponding subcategories for a more precise classification and analysis. The main objective was to see the difference of interpersonal metadiscourse usage between NSE and NNSE authors of international student handbooks. The corpus for this study consisted of 50 international student handbooks written by NSE authors, 10 handbooks from 10 different universities from the following NSE countries: USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Australia, and 50 handbooks written by NNSE authors, 10 handbooks from 10 different universities from the following NNSE countries: France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Japan. A total of 31,989 interpersonal metadiscourse markers from NSE handbooks were classified and analyzed, and a total of 12,948 interpersonal metadiscourse markers from NNSE handbooks were classified and analyzed. This study was rather unique in that, unlike the vast majority of the previous research performed on interpersonal metadisdourse which was done on the genre of the research article, it was focused on the business-academic genre of international student handbooks. For the statistical analysis, the obtained data was submitted to SPSS, and the ANOVA and T-tests were run. For the percentage analysis, percentages were computed for the main categories and subcategories of interactional metdisdourse. Significant and highly significant differences were discovered and discussed. On a general level, NNSE authors used a total of 10.03% of interactional metadiscourse while NNSE authors used only 5.69%. One of the most surprising results was a very significant difference between interactional metadiscourse usage between to NSE countries. UK authors used a total of 13.37% of interactional metadiscourse while authors from Australia used a mere 6.82%, representing a very unusual variance between 2 NSE countries. A broad conclusion of this study is that there is definitely a difference in interactional metadiscourse usage between NSE and NNSE authors of international student handbooks which could possibly be due to educational and/or cultural factors. One of the suggestions for possible further research in this field could be the impact of including interpersonality strategies in programs for teaching English as a foreign language