A Study Of The Use Of Stance Markers By Senior High School Students In Their English Argumentative Writing

The present study investigates the use of stance markers by Senior High School students in their English argumentative writing. The research questions addressed in this study are:1) What are the general characteristics of stance markers employed by Senior High School students in their English argumentative writing? 2) Are there any differences in the use of stance markers between high achievers and low achievers of English writing proficiency? If yes, what are the differences? 3) What is the relationship between Senior High School students’use of stance markers and their writing scores?Two instruments adopted in this study were an English argumentative writing test and interviews. Altogether 273 answer sheets were gathered from Senior Three students at a four-star senior high school in Nanjing and 267 were found valid. The quantitative data were processed with the help of the SPSS Statistics, Version 22.0. The qualitative data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 12 students among the 267 test-takers whose answer sheets were considered valid. The interviews were conducted in Chinese and the interview data were transcribed and translated into English.The classification of stance markers by Biber et al. (2000) functions as the basis for the present study and this study is restricted to grammatical stance devices, i.e. Stance Adverbials (Single Adverbs, Prepositional Phrases, Adverbial Clauses), Stance Complement Clauses (Verb+ Complement Clause, Adjective+Complement Clause, Noun+Complement Clause, WH-clauses), Modals and Semi-modals, Stance Noun+Prepositional Phrase, and Premodifying Stance Adverbs.Detailed analysis of both the quantitative and qualitative data yielded the following findings.Firstly, stance markers are not widely used by Senior High School students in their English argumentative writing. The total word number of grammatical marking of stance identified in the corpus accounts for approximately 10.59% of the total word number of the 267 pieces of English argumentative compositions. The average word number of stance markers per composition is nearly 16 and there are almost 11 stance markers per composition. Modals and Semi-modals (65.78%) are the most frequently used. Stance Adverbials (10.46%) and Stance Complement Clauses (23.24%) are moderately common. Stance Noun+Prepositional Phrase constructions (0.15%) and Premodifying Stance Adverbs (0.37%) are seldom used. In regard to specific Stance Adverbials, Prepositional Phrases (5.67%) are the most frequently used and Adverbial Clauses (1.99%) are the least frequently used. As for specific Stance Complement Clauses, Verb+ Complement Clause constructions (18.64%) are the most frequently used and WH-clauses (0.40%) are the least frequently used.Secondly, Senior High School students of high and low English writing proficiency are found to be significantly different from each other in the use of certain stance markers. Results show significant differences in the frequencies of Prepositional Phrases, Adverbial Clauses, Modals and Semi-modals between the high achievers and the low achievers but no differences in the frequencies of Single Adverbs, Verb+Complement Clause constructions, Adjective+ Complement Clause constructions, Noun+Complement Clause constructions, WH-clauses, Stance Noun+Prepositional Phrase constructions or Premodifying Stance Adverbs. On the whole, the high achievers made use of grammatical stance devices more frequently than the low achievers. The differences in the distributions of Stance Adverbials, Modals and Semi-modals are significant between high achievers and low achievers. With regard to specific Stance Adverbials, the high achievers applied Prepositional Phrases and Adverbial Clauses significantly more frequently than the low achievers. There are no significant differences between the two groups of achievers in the distributions of Stance Complement Clauses, Stance Noun+ Prepositional Phrase constructions or Premodifying Stance Adverbs.Finally, there exists some correlation between Senior High School students’use of stance markers and their writing scores. The frequencies of Stance Adverbials and Stance Complement Clauses are positively and significantly correlated with students’writing scores at the.01 level, and the frequency of Modals and Semi-modals is positively and significantly correlated with students’writing scores at the.05 level. There are no significant correlations between the frequencies of Stance Noun+Prepositional Phrase constructions, Premodifying Stance Adverbs and writing scores. In terms of distribution, Stance Adverbials as well as Modals and Semi-modals are significantly correlated with students’writing scores at the.01 level, and Stance Complement Clauses are significantly correlated with students’writing scores at the.05 level. Specifically, Prepositional Phrases and Adverbial Clauses are significantly correlated with students’ writing scores at the.05 level, and Noun+Complement Clause constructions and WH-clauses are also significantly correlated with students’ writing scores at the.05 level. All the correlation coefficients are positive. Likewise, there are no significant correlations between Stance Noun+Prepositional Phrase constructions, Premodifying Stance Adverbs and writing scores.The findings of the present study have some pedagogical implications for teaching and learning EFL writing in the Chinese context. On the one hand, EFL teachers should place more emphasis on stance markers and raise students’ awareness of them as well as their importance to English argumentative writing. They are expected to adopt individualized teaching methods to help students, especially low achievers, to develop their discoursal competence. On the other hand, students and EFL teachers ought to pay more attention to the content (e.g. ideas, arguments) of the essays.