Engagement in doctoral dissertation discussion sections written by English native speakers

Academic writing is seen as an attempt to involve interaction between writers and readers; hence, academics are required to not only produce texts representing external realities but also use language to recognize, build and exchange social relations. The present study was conducted to analyze how native English speaker, Ph.D. students in the field of TEFL position their texts intertextually when writing their doctoral dissertations’ discussion sections. To this end, ten discussion sections were selected and meticulously analyzed based on the Engagement subsystem of the Appraisal Framework. The frequency of occurrence of every dialogic Engagement resource was identified, and its functionalities were explicated and exemplified. The results indicated that the examined writers used various dialogic resources to engage themselves in dialogue with their potential interlocutors. They also preferred to limit the possibility of being rejected or challenged by using dialogically contractive Engagement resources more than dialogically expansive ones.