A Study Of Stance Verbs In English Majors’Argumentative Writings

In recent years, plenty of literature has investigated students’compositions, especially argumentations, on the basis of several important features of the discourse, including information structure, theme-rheme structure, cohesion and coherence. Although some scholars at home and abroad have conducted the researches into stance markers in academic discourses and technological discourses, there is still a gap in the investigation of stance markers in English majors’argumentations.Therefore, the current study is to examine the characteristics of stance verbs in English majors’argumentations and figure out the root of those features by means of questionnaire in order to offer effective suggestions for argumentative writing teaching, resulting in students’high argumentative writing proficiency. This study includes two corpora-English majors’argumentations corpus i.e. the observed corpus and model argumentations corpus i.e. the reference corpus. The former one contains67argumentations, being collected from Part Ⅲ of the final-term writing test for second-year English majors at Taiyuan University of Technology; the latter one is also comprised of67argumentations, of which56argumentations were drawn from Nick Stirk’s A Winning Approach to TEM4Writing,5argumentations from his100Topics for TEM Writing and6argumentations from Mi Chunxia’s A Winning Approach to TEM4(2002-2011). The thesis will firstly analyze134argumentations by means of the three instruments:Wconcord, AntConc and SPSS16.0.The results could indicate:(1) According to the analyses of overall features of stance verbs in the two corpora, stance verbs account for5.35%of total words in English majors’ argumentations and3.96%in model argumentations, implying English majors have the awareness of stance.(2) English majors are highly dependent on modals, complement clauses controlled by stance verbs and rarely on simple lexical verbs and multi-word verbs to convey their stance.(3) As for the use of complement clauses controlled by stance verbs, English majors frequently use the structure "stance verb+that-clause" yet rarely use the structure "stance verb+to-clause".(4) From the semantic perspective, complement clauses controlled by stance verbs are the most frequently used to convey English majors’ epistemic and style stance. Additionally, they usually use simple lexical verbs to express their attitudinal stance.(5) The overused and underused stance verbs co-exist in English majors’argumentations by comparison with specific stance verbs in model argumentations. For example,"can","will","think" and "know" are overused while "believe" and "hold" are underused in English majors’argumentations.In addition, the author of this thesis will investigate the67English majors’responses to items in the questionnaire so as to track down the root of features of stance verbs in their argumentations. The questionnaire mainly involves three aspects:students’attitude towards argumentative writing, their knowledge of stance markers in argumentations and their comments on argumentative writing teaching and learning. The analyses of the results of the questionnaire display:(1)38.46%of subjects never do any argumentative writing practice besides assignments. And75.38%of them hold the improvement of argumentative writing proficiency aims to get a good job or pass the examination. These results show they do not pay much attention to argumentative writing.(2)66.15%of subjects know a little about stance. Moreover,56.92%of them frequently use "think","know","know that" or "think that" to express their stance and rarely use such stance verbs as "hold","advocate" or "suppose", which is explained by subjects that50.77%of them know the meanings of those stance verbs but don’t know how they are used in argumentation.(3) Of subjects,29%suggest teachers should introduce the knowledge of stance markers in detail to students and offer a large number of instances;41.69%hope teachers show model argumentations on different types of stance markers.On the basis of the above findings, the author offers four suggestions for argumentative writing teaching:promoting English majors’realization of English argumentative writing, encouraging students to build the link between specific words and context, systematically introducing the knowledge of stance to students, offering numerous stance words, instances and more exercises about stance.