Academic writers resort to hedging as one of the interpersonal metadiscourse category not only to present their findings cautiously but also to minimize the effects of Face Threatening Acts (FTAs). The purpose of the present study was to compare and contrast the frequency and types of hedges in Discussion sections of Environmental Sciences Research Articles (RAs) written by English Research Writers (ERWs), Iranian Research Writers (IRWs) who write in English, and Iranian Research Writers (IRWs) who write in Farsi. To this end, 60 RAs in the targeted field were selected from leading journals (20 for each group), and then the used hedges were analyzed based on Salager-Meyer (1994) taxonomy. With regard to the use of hedges in English, this study did not find any significant differences between English and Iranian authors’ writings. However, the findings revealed significant differences between English and Farsi written articles. This discrepancy can be attributed to the nature of Farsi language which might consider less hedged texts as highly validated ones. However, this is opposed to the credibility of using hedges in this field in the international academic discourse community

Recently, teacher training courses have attracted the researchersí special attention, while teacher education programs have not received as much attention. The present study investigated the attitudes key stakeholders in a teacher education program (i.e., student teachers, in-service teachers, and teacher educators) hold toward the appropriateness of TEFL teacher education programs at an Iranian teacher education university and their relevance to and sustainable impact in the real teaching context. To this end, 62 pre-service teachers, 48 in-service teachers, and 28 teacher educators filled out the Foreign Language Teacher Education Program Evaluation questionnaire adapted from Peacock (2009). The results of ANOVA tests indicated that the pre-service teachers and teacher educators found courses with literary strands less relevant to English language teaching and believed that those courses should be modified or replaced by teaching more knowledge-building or knowledge-applying subjects. In addition, the in-service teachers harboured a negative perspective towards the courses which were not practical in the real classroom setting and considered them less empowering. All three groups found teaching-related courses, such as teaching methodology, of more sustainable nature and useful in the real teaching context. Besides, the participants believed that it is essential for the universities to incorporate several practical courses including practicum and classroom observations within the curriculum. This study suggests that accommodating key stakeholdersí preferences in a teacher education programs could lead to crafting more accountable and empowering teacher education programs.

Metadiscourse markers (MDMs) are lexical resources that writers employ to organize their discourse and state their stance towards the content or the reader. This study investigated the frequency with which interactive and interactional MDMs were employed in biological research articles (RAs). It also explored the possible relationship between the frequency of these markers and Impact Factor (IF) of journals as an index of quality. Moreover, it aimed at finding out the difference(s) between two groups of authors (Iranian and American) in their use of these markers. Forty biological RAs published in years 2008-2011 written by Iranian non-native authors and published in four ISI journals with different IFs and 40 articles with the same characteristics published by American native authors were selected and examined for the use of the markers. The results showed that there was a strong positive correlation between the frequency of MDMs and IF of the journals. Regarding the frequency of MDMs, it was observed that Iranian authors employed interactive and interactional markers slightly more than their American counterparts. These results may provisionally confirm the considerable role of MDMs in enhancing the coherence and organization of articles for possible publication in high-impact journals. © 2016 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 44(4):349-360, 2016.

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