| Evaluative language has rarely been deeply explored, especially in teaching academic English writing. This study focuses on comparing evaluative language in students’ and published papers of science and two small-sized corpora are established with 14 pieces of students’ articles from an International symposium and 14 pieces of published articles from international famous journals, which are consistent in subjects of chemistry, material, environment, food and biology engineering and machinery.Identification is manually conducted by two coders and Cohen’s K is calculated to test their agreement of identification. AntConc 3.2.2 is used to collect and present different types of evaluation and SPSS 19.0 tests the discrepancies between student writers and published writers.Differences and overlaps are found among different scholars of evaluative language study. Halliday treats modality as evaluative resource and Martin divides attitude of appraisal system into affect, judgment and appreciation, which is both a bridge and an extension to modality. Besides evaluation is functionally divided by Hunston into status, value and relevance, which compensates Martin’s ignorance in evaluation and textual organization. On these grounds, this study creates an analyzing framework to discover the overall employment and distribution of evaluation from four dimensions of affect, judgment, appreciation and relevance. The findings are obtained as follows:(1) In terms of overall employment of evaluation, affect is rarely used in both students’ and published articles; Capacity, veracity and propriety are three main types of judgment used in both corpora, but among 6 subcategories of judgment, student writers adopt significantly less tenacity and propriety than published writers;Composition and valuation are two main types of appreciation and there are significant differences between student writers and published writers with student writers using less composition but more valuation than published writers; Relevance is less employed by student writers than published writers with significant difference.(2) In terms of evaluation distribution in sections, student writers mainly use valuation, veracity and capacity in ABSTRCT while published writers use two more types as main evaluation, namely relevance and normality. Besides, student writers use significantly less valuation and capacity than published writers. In INTRODUCTION, student writers principally employ normality, capacity, veracity and propriety, in addition to which published writers use one more type of evaluation on composition. In METHODS, tenacity and propriety are two main types of evaluation used in both corpora and student writers use them significantly less than published writers. In R&D, relevance, veracity, propriety and valuation are main types of evaluation in both corpora and student writers use less appreciation with significant difference from published writers. In CONCLUSION, there are no significant differences between two groups in employing capacity and valuation as main types.The above findings indicate that academic English teachers should remind students of using affect prudently and compared to published writers, student writers have to improve their ability in using tenacity, propriety, composition and relevance,to which teachers should attach importance. Besides, evaluative resources highlight the purposes of rhetorical organization in each section but student writers’ employment of evaluation lacks diversity in ABSTRCT and INTRODUCTION.Student writers are unable to sufficiently use tenacity, propriety in METHODS and relevance in R&D while they are basically able to employ evaluation in CONCLUSION. Therefore teachers should develop students’ awareness of the function of evaluation to rhetorical organization in each section and pay more attention to the evaluation that students have problems with. |
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