A Comparative Study On Stance Expressions In Results And Discussion Sections Of English MA Theses Between Chinese EFL Learners And Native Writers

Over the past decades,it has been gradually recognized and accepted that academic discourse does not simply built on researcher's objective and impersonal representations towards the external world,but perhaps more on their negotiation of authorial stance and the engagement with the target readers.As one of the most popular items of research,stance expressions have been broadly investigated and described under various labels.In the present study,based on the framework of metadiscourse and the model of interaction proposed by Hyland(2005a,2005b),the author conducted a comparative study and explored how stance expressions(including hedges,boosters,self-mentions and attitude markers)were employed in Results and Discussion sections of English MA Theses that written by Chinese EFL Learners and native Writers.There are mainly three research questions to be investigated: What are the similarities and differences in the use of stance expressions in Results and Discussion sections between MA theses written by Chinese EFL learners and native English writers in terms of overall frequency and distributional features? What are the similarities and differences in the use of each kind of stance expressions in Results and Discussion sections between MA theses written by Chinese EFL learners and native English writers in terms of their frequencies,features and functions? What stances were constructed by the two groups of students?After constructing the parallel corpora,the author searched and extracted the stance expressions with a list of words and phrases summarized from the previous studies.By counting the standard frequencies,comparing the significance with the tool of Log-likelihood and closely examining the concordance lines in their context,the present study indicated that in general,Chinese students employed significantly less stance expressions in their dissertations.A closer examination demonstrated that compared with their native counterparts,Chinese students conveyed more assertive authorial stances in their dissertations as a joint function of a considerably lower frequency of hedges and a higher frequency of boosters.Besides,their authorial roles were less prominent and independent as a result of the underuse of self-mentions,attitude markers and a nearly completely avoidance of singular personal pronouns.After proposing the possible reasons for the differences,the present study provided some pedagogical implications for students who have similar difficulties in negotiating their stance.