Exploring Stance In Chinese University EFL Students’ Argumentative Writing

It is well known that writing is the interaction between the writer and the reader. By written texts, the writer can construe solidarity and alignment with the potential readers. In recent years, more and more research begin to focus on stance and interpersonal management in ESL writers’ academic writing, yet few studies explore how EFL writers, especially Chinese EFL students deal with this challenge.This study, drawing on the Engagement system in the Appraisal Theory, by the quantitative and qualitative analysis conducted towards 30 argumentative writings composed by senior English major students in a university, tries to make clear the distributional characteristics of Engagement resources in these writing, the distributional difference of Engagement resources in different parts of these writing and the stance-taking strategies in these writing. This study aims to explore the use of appraisal resources in Chinese university EFL students’ argumentative writing, to reveal the distribution characteristics of appraisal resources and how the appraisal resources are used to enable authors to present a stance, and to make these resources explicit to EFL student writers, so as to provide some pedagogical implications.The study shows that much more dialogic contraction is employed in Chinese university EFL students’ argumentative writings, rather than dialogic expansion; in contractive resources, “disclaim” is used more frequently than “proclaim”; and “entertain” is used much less than “attribute” in expansive resources. All the argumentative writings consist of three parts: thesis, argument and conclusion. “Pronounce” appears most frequently in the part of thesis. In the part of argument, relatively speaking, “disclaim”, “deny”, “counter”, “concur” and “endorse” are fully used. As for the distribution of Expand resources, the part of conclusion employs little Expand resources relatively. Attribute, acknowledge and distance are more likely to appear in the part of thesis. While entertain has a preference for the part of argument. There are four major stance-taking strategies discovered in Chinese university EFL students’ better argumentative writings, which are rhetorical pairs of concur-counter or deny-counter, attribute-disclaim strategy, entertainment and the alternative expand-contract pattern.