Nasim Ghanbari

Abstract Engagement in academic writing takes place when we recognise the presence of our readers and bring them in the text through reader mentions, directives, knowledge appeals, questions and asides. This is a striking feature of academic reader-engaging texts and has attracted considerable interest among researchers. Despite this, little is ever unfolded about how reader engagement is done in locally and internationally published articles. For example, in our context, do Iranian writers underuse, properly use or overuse reader engagement markers (REMs) compared to writers from high-ranking international journals? In an attempt to find out how this has been done recently, 300 English language teaching (ELT) and chemical engineering (ChE) research articles (150 for each discipline) were randomly chosen from 2015-2020 issues of the international journals constituted the reference corpus. The focus corpus, on the other hand, consisted of 30 ELT and 30 chemical engineering research articles published in Iranian local journals. Thus, we compared and contrasted the abovementioned groups of writers to see if they differ in the frequencies and the functions of the REMs used in their articles. The results indicated that writers in Iranian local journals are lagging behind in engaging their readers, yet they use them for approximately the same purposes. The findings of the present study thus may offer implications to Iranian English writers of ELT and chemical engineering as to how much and for what purposes they should interact with their readers.