Stance Construction In Rrporting Verbs And Source In Acdemic Texts

In academic discourse, the reporting clauses represent the authors’ knowledge of the special field.Authors, who can use reporting skillfully, show that they are very familiar with the academic standard andthey have a profound basis of academic knowledge. Reporting is also a powerful rhetorical device ofconstructing conversation space and expressing the stance. Whether the author can use this well or not has adirect influence on the thesis quality, its persuasiveness, and its interestingness. One of the judge standard isobservation through the reporting verbs and their sources.However, according to previous researches, many young writers, especially the student writers atuniversity, they cannot use reporting verbs properly to cite others’ opinion. Even though they can changetheir choice, they still have some problems.The research on reporting has aroused great interest for most scholars. However, in the past severalyears, the research has been concentrated on the reporting structure and grammatical study of reportingverbs. There is little study about reporting and stance construction between Chinese students andinternational researchers. Therefore, it is necessary to compare these two kinds of writers in using reportingverbs combined with different reporting source.The present research focuses on the number of reporting clauses, reporting verbs group and theirfrequency, and their denoted semantic meaning combined with their source. It tends to point out theproblems students have in reporting and their stance.The present author constructs the corpora and use software of PowerGrep, antconc3.2.4, andchi-square examination to make quantitative and qualitative analysis of the reporting clause. The result shows that Chinese students have mastered the basic usage of reporting clause but seem tonot have realized the rhetorical function of reporting verbs. They often mix the positive, neutral andnegative verbs. On the other hand, the international researchers usually use some verbs especially negativereporting verbs intentionally to denote a meaning of disagreement. On the aspect of reporting source,students tend to use other source rather than first person and then the writer conceal his or her own identity.In general, students use reporting clauses much more rigid than the international researchers. Theyusually ignore the interpersonal function of different reporting verbs. When they cite other researchers’work, they usually use them directly without critical comment. There are generally no interaction amongthesis writer, cited author and the reader. Therefore, students writers usually do not express clear stance andseem not to be confident. This phenomenon is related to their academic background and their proficiency ofEnglish. This research will give some suggestion for English academic writing.