1 Introduction

In academic English writing, authors construct their personal identity through language resources, influencing readers' impressions and understanding of the text. As a key language resource, meta discourse reflects the author's meta pragmatic competence, and there are different views on its definition and classification among scholars at home and abroad. Hyland's classification of interpersonal and interactive meta discourse has been recognized, emphasizing the role of meta discourse in text negotiation and interactivity. Previous studies have explored the importance of self referential language in identity construction, but further research is needed to investigate the impact of other interactive meta discourse resources on identity construction. This study will analyze the usage characteristics of interactive meta discourse in Chinese master's theses and international journal papers, explore the similarities and differences in identity construction between Chinese master's students and international journal authors, and enrich the research on interactive meta discourse.

2. Review of relevant literature

Interactive meta discourse is a means for authors to interact with readers in academic texts, including subcategories such as fuzzy restrictive language, reinforcement words, attitude markers, intervention markers, and self referential language. These methods help the author express their position, evaluate the content of the proposition, and establish an interactive relationship with the reader. Fuzzy restrictive language displays the author's cautious attitude, strengthens the word to highlight the cognitive position, attitude markers enhance persuasiveness, intervention markers describe the interaction and negotiation between the author and the reader, and self referential language helps the author establish personal identity. Research shows that there are differences in the use of interactive meta discourse across different languages, disciplines, and academic texts, and Chinese learners and native speakers also have differences in their use.

3 Research Design

This chapter introduces the research design, including the construction of two corpora: the Chinese Master's Thesis Corpus (MTC) and the International Journal Papers Corpus (IJAC), covering empirical papers in applied linguistics from 2016 to 2020. MTC is selected from CNKI, and IJAC is selected from the top 6 international journals in Web of Science rankings. To ensure comparability, 20 master's theses and 40 journal articles were selected, with storage capacities of 316417 and 319782, respectively. The study aims to explore the characteristics of the use of interactive meta discourse and the differences in identity types constructed by Chinese master's students and international journal authors in English academic writing. The research steps include: 1) determining and annotating interactive meta discourse based on Hyland's classification criteria; 2) Determine identity based on the category of identity construction; 3) Standardize data processing and analyze differences. Use two person cross validation to ensure annotation reliability. The study does not include the identity of the organizer, proposes the category of researcher identity, and draws on Martin u0026 White's (2005) attitude system classification to subdivide attitude markers. Detailed determination of the identity category of the first person plural pronoun 'we'.

4 Results and Discussion

In the comparative study of international journal articles and domestic master's theses, it was found that international journal authors use interactive meta discourse more frequently to establish positive relationships with readers. Fuzzy restrictive language is the most common interactive metalanguage that both master's students and journal authors tend to use, but master's students use it less frequently, which may be related to teachers' direct requirements for English academic writing. There is also a significant difference in the use of reinforcement words between the two groups of authors, with journal authors preferring to use them to highlight the innovation of their research. The distribution of attitude resources shows that high-level authors tend to prefer objective evaluation, while master's students use fewer emotional and appreciation markers than journal authors, but there is no significant difference in evaluation markers. There are significant differences in the use of intervention markers and self referential language, with master's students more inclined to guide others to intervene, while journal authors interact more directly with readers.

5 Conclusion

This study is based on the theoretical framework of Hyland and Sun Li. By comparing Chinese master's theses with international journal articles, it was found that Chinese master's students have significant differences in the frequency and manner of using interactive meta discourse in academic writing compared to international journal authors. Chinese students use less fuzzy restrictive language, reinforcement words, attitude markers, and self referential language, and more use intervention markers. In terms of identity construction, there are significant differences between Chinese master's students and international journal authors in categories such as spontaneous interactors and spontaneous interactors, but there is no significant difference in the identity of cautious proposers. These differences may be related to the writing guidance and academic writing patterns of Chinese students, and have enlightening implications for college English academic writing teaching.