The abstract is a specialized type of academic discourse, like a lecture, literature review or research article, and therefore related to the expression and transmission of knowledge. The scientific literature offers numerous studies on the abstract as an academic genre based on corpora created by researchers who are themselves experts in their respective disciplines (Cavalieri 2014, Dos Santos 1996, Lorés & Bondi 2014, Saeeaw & Tangkiengsirisin 2014). Nonetheless, there exist relatively few studies which analyse how student writers acquire mastery over this genre (Aktas & Cortes 2008, Díez Prados 2018). As a contribution to filling this gap in the research, in the present study we will examine a corpus of abstracts written by undergraduates, focusing in particular on their use of interactive metadiscourse markers and the relationship between such markers and the rhetorical structure of the texts.

This work was supported by the Assessment of Discourse Competence in Adult Plurilingual Learners: Detecting Learners’ Needs and Instructions for Autonomous Learning project (EDU2016-75874-P) under the Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica 2016 of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and co-financed by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) and the European Union’s Regional Development Fund (FEDER). The authors of this article belong to the Gr@el research group (Grup de recerca sobre aprenentatge i ensenyament de llengües ‘Language Learning and Teaching Research Group’), which is funded by a Catalan government AGAUR 2017-2019 grant (ref. 2017 SGR 915).