The present study sets out to address a critical academic feature necessary to understand research articles (RAs) through investigating foreign language (FL) Tunisian doctoral students' awareness of the kind of relationship between text, writer, and readership in English research articles across three distinct disciplines: Linguistics, Economics, and Chemistry. The study focuses on how this awareness is shown in lexico-grammatical choices and analyzed through Ädel's (2006) model of metadiscourse. The study investigates the relationship between the participants' awareness of the reflexive metadiscursive units and subject-matter knowledge, reading strategies, and language proficiency. These three elements constitute the basics of learning foreign languages and analyzing their connections to metadiscourse can lead to developing a deeper grasp of the pre-requisite conditions for comprehension. Their analysis would yield useful insights on the most appropriate ways of teaching academic reading/writing to university students, raise their motivation for learning and help them acquire the required skills that allow them to become members in full standing of their respective academic communities.