A corpus-based comparison of linguistic markers of stance and genre in the academic writing of novice and advanced engineering learners

Abstract

Stance-taking in academic writing plays a crucial role in enabling tertiary academic writers to express their positions about their topics and other voices. Based on a corpus linguistic analysis of academic reports by civil and environmental engineering (CEE) undergraduate students and student papers in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), this article investigates the use of stance markers in the genres of persuasive and argumentative writing as well as analytical explanatory writing. This study compares the stance markers used by L2 engineering students (Hong Kong University) and native engineering students (U.S. University) to investigate the genre-specific lexical stance patterns used by academic writers. This study found that stance within the CEE reports and MICUSP was expressed through approximative hedges and boosters, code glosses, and adversative and contrast connections, pointing to a specific developmental trajectory as academic writers. Non-native engineering students were found to use a significantly smaller number of approximative, self-mention, and evidential verb hedges. In addition, they tend to use a more significant number of modal hedges compared to native English speakers. The CEE students’ reports also tended to be characterized by the underuse of boosters, contrastive connectors, emphasis, and counter-expectancy markers. However, the study found no significant difference in the use of exemplification markers between the CEE and MICUSP. The findings of this study support the construction of the academic stance as a process of delimiting one’s perspective. This is achieved by deploying selected stance features to account for other scholarly perspectives.