Attitude and Engagement Markers in Pakistani Academic Writing of Sciences and Social Sciences

This paper explores the interactional patterns employed in the professional writing of research articles of two fields of academia. This is a corpus-based study. The corpus contains 100 research articles from the fields of Sciences and Social Sciences. The authorial strategies of attitude and engagement markers of two faculties have been examined following Hyland's (2005) framework of metadiscourse. The results of this study have shown that the voices of researchers from the field of Social Sciences are more visible in their academic interactions and they seek to establish a bond with their readers more explicitly. The field of Sciences is moving in the opposite dimension. The findings of the study can be exploited as a guide to increase the awareness of ESL learners regarding how to engage the readers in the text.