Central to successful communication is an integration of talk about the experiential world and how this is made coherent, intelligible and persuasive to a particular readership. Metadiscourse equips us to achieve this interactivity. Simply, metadiscourse captures the ways writers organize their texts to help readers interpret, evaluate, and react to the propositional information they supply (Hyland, 2005a; Jiang, 2022; Jiang & Hyland, 2018). In other words, the involved parties of communication build a relationship and engage through the set of functional metadiscourse units (Akbaş & Hatipoğlu, 2018). It is now a widely used term in current linguistic analysis, pragmatics and discourse studies, and has grown up tremendously over the past 40 years. To illustrate the growth in the field, a topic search by us as of early 2022 on the Scopus returns about 620 papers, and Google Scholar contains a surprising number of 25,600 documents on the topic. Noticing the amount of efforts put by various researchers in different contexts, a number of consecutive conferences uniquely dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge on metadiscourse have been held (see Metadiscourse across Genres (MAG) 2017, Cyprus; MAG 2019, Italy; MAG2021, Spain as well as Metadiscourse across Languages and Contexts (MALC) 2019, China). By connecting academicians who are into researching metadiscourse and related concepts across genres, languages and contexts, these conferences have undoubtedly contributed to the advancement of the field by welcoming new researchers and topics into the field. Metadiscourse therefore seems to have found its time, and welcomes an updated focused discussion which well situates its use across different languages, registers and genres.
