ABSTRACT
Academic discourse (AD) has been described in literature as objective and impersonal. However, if we refer to the description of discourse which Swales already proposed in 1990, there exist four different communicative components in discourse, of which some involve the writer–reader interactions, whereas others involve the form or the content of the message, as will be explained later. AD seems to be including new, or modified rhetorical strategies to support authors’ claims and convince their readers of the interest of their findings. These strategies include greater presence of authors in texts, by means, for instance, or the use of personal pronouns or self-references, but also the expression of emotions. These tactics increase the degree of difficulty for non-native English (NNE) speakers who choose to write their research in English, and need to be addressed by teachers in their instruction, for successful classroom results. The study analyses the expression of emotions found in texts written in English by native English (NE) and NNE speakers. In particular, a corpus of Master’s Theses (MT) is analysed. Findings show that strategies used in the L1 and the L2 are dissimilar, thus implying a need for further analysis and pedagogical adjustments.
