COMPARISON OF INTERACTIVE AND INTERACTIONAL METADISCOURSE IN ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY MALE AND FEMALE STUDENTS OFENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT UNIVERSITAS AIRLANGGA

Writing is required to be effective and communicative; gender differences may affect the way the writer construct their behavioral identity through writing production. Due to the need of engagement of the reader to the writing message, however, there are some aspects of rhetorical strategies to create the communicative writing; one of them is the application of metadiscourse features. The aim of this study is to investigate the two dimensions of metadiscourse features proposed by Hyland (2005), interactive and interactional metadiscourse. The study employed mixed method approach. Corpus analysis was run to obtain the hit number of metadiscourse features that appear in the data. The writer collected the data from male and female students of English Department students in the third semester that passed the argumentative class. Sixty argumentative essays were collected from 30 male and 30 female students. The data of metadiscourse features were obtained from Antconc. The study shows male and female students presented different characteristics in the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse. Transition marker and hedges were the most metadiscourse commonly used by male and female students in the argumentative essays. Moreover, the result also showed that male students tended to use more evidential metadiscourse and code glosses than female students. Meanwhile, frame marker and transition marker constantly appear in female‟s essays rather than male‟s essays. For the interactional metadiscourse, male students presented low frequency in the use of hedges but high frequency in the use of self-mention. It is opposite to the female metadiscourse. This fact portrays the behavioral identity that male is characterized as confident and assertive, while female has the highest social sensitivity and politeness in the social life. The result also indicates there is no significant difference between male and female students in the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse, but each gender presents the different characteristic in applying metadiscouse.