The present study aims to investigate cultural variations in the use of metadiscourse between Turkish and USA postgraduate students' abstracts in MA thesis written in English. The taxonomy was borrowed from Hyland (2005). The corpora in the present study comprise a total of 52 thesis abstracts written in English from the department of English Language Teaching, 26 thesis from USA students and 26 from Turkish students. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to analyse the texts in the corpora. The analysis revealed that there were some cultural differences in the amounts and types of metadiscourse. The incidence of evidential, endophorics, code glosses, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions were fewer in Turkish students' master thesis abstracts. However, Turkish students used metadiscourse transitions, frame markers and hedges more than USA students. Pedagogical implications were provided in light of empirical data.
Medical personnel in hospital intensive care units routinely rely on protocols to deliver some types of patient care. These protocol documents are developed by hospital physicians and staff to ensure that standards of care are followed. Thus, the protocol document becomes a de facto standing order, standing in for the physician's judgment in routine situations. This article reports findings from Phase I of an ongoing study exploring how insulin protocols are designed and used in intensive care units to transfer medical research findings into patient care “best practices.” We developed a taxonomy of document design elements and analyzed 29 insulin protocols to determine their use of these elements. We found that 93% of the protocols used tables to communicate procedures for measuring glucose levels and administering insulin. We further found that the protocols did not adhere well to principles for designing instructions and hypothesized that this finding reflected different purposes for instructions (training) and protocols (standardizing practice).
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