Sustainable Development of EFL Learners’ Research Writing Competence and Their Identity Construction: Chinese Novice Writer-Researchers’ Metadiscourse Use in English Research Articles

English for foreign language (EFL) novice writer-researchers are faced with an increasing pressure for international publication as a prerequisite for sustainable career development in academia. The use of metadiscourse, as a key indicator for their discourse competence, has been a subject of research for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and/or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) scholars. This study investigates metadiscourse features of research articles’ (RA) results and discussion (R&D) sections written by Chinese PhD students and their writer identities reflected through metadiscourse choice. A corpus was built, consisting of a subcorpus of R&D of unpublished research articles (RAs) written by Chinese PhD students (CNWs) and one of the same part-genre by English-speaking expert writers (EEWs). Metadiscourse used by the two groups were identified based on Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse. Quantitative analyses on the frequency and variety of metadiscourse markers found a significant difference not only in interactional metadiscourse but also in some subcategories of interactive and interactional metadiscourse, indicating that CNWs attach more importance to organisation of ideas than to the persuasiveness of arguments. A questionnaire survey was conducted to explore the influence of the CNWs’ perception of RA writing on their metadiscourse choice. It revealed that knowledge of generic conventions and metadiscourse functions, awareness of the writer–reader relationship, and confidence in language competence may influence metadiscourse choice. The paper concludes with the view that the CNWs generally view themselves as a recounter and reporter of their research, remaining conservative when presenting an authoritative voice and a confident identity as a knowledge creator.