Freshman writing courses offered in the higher education on the Gulf Council Countries (GCC) follow the American model where all freshman students are expected to take one or more semester long writing courses that focus on critical reading, rhetorical awareness, and genre awareness. These courses are designed to help freshman students bridge the gap between their secondary education and college level writing that they are expected to produce. These non-native students are usually blamed for their production in the same way as native students have long been criticized for not being “able to write English at the minimal college level” (Sheils 1975 p.58). The case is often complicated because to these students English is a second or a foreign language which is also the medium of education in which they are expected to produce academic papers. Metadiscourse markers represent one of the important features of academic writing. Metadiscourse markers are defined as "words which follow each other more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape text meanings and contributing to our sense of distinctiveness in a register" (Hyland 2008). The presence of such formulaic expressions indicates the writer's competence in the discipline and to readers these occurrences seem very 'natural'. This paper utilizes quantitative and qualitative approaches to compare how freshman students across different cultures use metadiscourse markers in their writing. The study relies on two learner corpora of consisting of 100 argumentative essays, the first is built from writings of American students and the second consists of writings of Arab students. The researcher adopts Hyland (2005) model to examine the linguistic features used by L1 and L2 writers to project their stance in arguments. This corpus-based analysis examines stance across two different cultures to understand the extent of its influence on students’ choices of metadiscourse markers. By combining language-based and socio-rhetorical context-based approaches, the study aims to highlight practical teaching techniques that address the practical needs of Arab learners. References Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies,7(2), 173-191. doi:10.5040/9781350037939.0015 Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes. doi:10.5040/9781350037939.0030 Sheils, M. (1975). Why Johnny Can't Write? Newsweek. Retrieved July 26, 2018, from http://engl697-goleman.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/Why Johnny can't write.pdf