Interactive Metadiscourse Use in Popular Science Subgenres

The modern digital era has made scientific knowledge more available to the lay audience crafting immediate access to the latest discoveries. This study aimed to investigate how interactive metadiscourse markers contributed to organizing and presenting ideas in popular science subgenres, including books, TV documentaries, magazine articles, and newspaper articles, to create engaging and accessible content for a lay audience. A corpus of 987,625 words was analyzed using AntConc, with Hyland’s (2019) Interpersonal Model guiding the identification of marker frequency. The findings revealed 75,477 instances of interactive markers, with transitions and code glosses being the most frequently used. The analysis highlights both similarities and differences in marker usage across subgenres, illustrating how these tools shape content organization and engagement strategies. This study emphasizes the importance of developing explicit EAP/ESP resources to help language instructors and novice researchers, especially non-English L1 speakers, understand the rhetorical roles of interactive markers. Such resources can enhance genre-specific writing practices and improve audience engagement in the context of popular science discourse.