Language Teaching Research Quarterly

A published research article is not the final product in the knowledge dissemination circle. One genre entailing negotiation of academic outcomes is reply articles which seem to carry an evaluative burden (Khosravi & Babaii, 2017) and provide the academics with an opportunity to communicate their comments and criticisms on the published research findings. Nevertheless, it seems to have been underestimated compared to other genres in academic discourse communities. Attempting to fill this void, the current study attempted to investigate the frequency of interactional metadiscourse markers in 19 reply articles published in academic journals in applied linguistics from 2016 to 2021. Coding the interactional resources of Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse revealed that self-mentions were the commonest interactional metadiscourse markers followed by hedges, boosters, engagement markers and attitude markers in the reply articles. The study contributes to the existing literature by corroborating the genre-specific nature of interactional metadiscourse and has implications for the academic reading and writing course designers and material developers.