Assess graduate students' ability to identify and analyze metadiscourse markers (e.g., transitions, engagement resources, self-mentions, hedges, boosters, evidentials) and associated epistemic stance in excerpts from L2 doctoral theses across disciplines; tasks include coding passages for metadiscourse categories, comparing marker frequency and function across disciplinary genres, interpreting how markers construct authorial voice and knowledge claims, and evaluating implications for disciplinary rhetoric, L2 academic literacy, and methodological choices (e.g., corpus sampling, coding schema, intercoder reliability).