“What I want you to remember is…”: Audience orientation in monologic academic discourse

This article offers some background on notions related to intersubjectivity in applied linguistics, specifically as studied in EAP. The study takes a reflexive approach to metadiscourse, investigating audience orientation in three monologic academic genres: advanced student writing, published academic prose and spoken lectures. Specifically, audience orientation involving second person you is examined from the perspective of the discourse functions in which the word is involved. A randomly selected dataset of 150 examples from each of the three genres was coded for metadiscursive functions, applying Ädel’s (2010) taxonomy. The results showed that the distribution of discourse functions was similar in the three registers; however, the highest frequency of metadiscourse was found in the spoken lectures, not in the written modes.