EFL Learners’ Development of Voice In Academic Writing: Lexical bundles, Boosters/Hedges and Stance-taking Strategies

Abstract

In EFL composition courses, teaching and learning normally orbit around norms of unity, coherence, support, and sentence skills that L2 learners are expected to comply with, at the expense of opportunities to develop voice. Against this backdrop, we resolved to examine the extent to which students’ exposure to and practice with lexical bundles, boosters/hedges and stance-taking strategies allows them to build a stronger discoursal and authorial voice as future academic writers. Evaluation of the students’ works revealed their level of success in this endeavor and analysis of student surveys unveiled the tensions and struggles they faced along the way. At the end of this paper, we advocate for academic writing courses to be transformed into spaces where students not only come to terms with the basic norms they have to conform to, but also build a discoursal and authorial voice as L2 writers.

Investigating the impact of explicit and implicit instruction on the use of interactional metadiscourse markers

“…Second, the treatment in the current study lasted a total of 140 min in the course of the two sessions. This stands in stark contrast to earlier studies (e.g., Escobar et al, 2017;Nguyen et al, 2012) where the intervention sometimes spanned an entire semester. In fact, earlier studies on pragmatic instruction (e.g., Jeon & Kaya, 2006;Taguchi 2015) indicate that pragmatics requires more time than other areas of language learning to be acquired.…”

“…Third, the participants completed most of the treatment activities collaboratively, which may have prevented some individual students from actually noticing the targeted features. In contrast, the majority of earlier studies that lend strong support to explicit instruction engaged students in individual writing tasks (e.g., Escobar et al, 2017;Farahani 2019).…”

“…However, the explicit group performed significantly better than the implicit group on all the outcome measures. Another study was undertaken by Escobar and Fernández (2017), who trained 33 Costa Rican undergraduates majoring in TESOL and EFL for 5 months on the use of lexical bundles, boosters/hedges and stance-taking strategies to help them build a strong discoursal and authorial voice. The learners' performance on posttest compositions showed significant progress in their effective use of the targeted features, although participants' responses to surveys administered towards the end of the study testify to the tension and struggles they faced along the way.…”

Expressions of Criticality in Expert and Student Writing: A Corpus Contrastive Analysis of Literature Reviews

“…The term criticality was coined by Bruce (2014) to describe evaluative judgments made by writers within any field of human activity about some aspect, object, or behavior of that field. In the last few decades, criticality in academic writing has been approached from various angles using different terms like evaluation (Geng & Wharton, 2016;Tucker, 2003;Xie, 2016), stance (Biber, 2006;Charles, 2006;Crosthwaite, Cheung & Jiang, 2017;Hyland, 2005;Jiang & Hyland, 2015), and also voice (Escobar & Fernández, 2018;Lores-Sanz, 2011;Matsuda & Jeffery, 2012;Nelson & Castello, 2012) to show writer's viewpoints, emotions, attitudes, and positions towards certain entities or propositions. All of these are elements of critical evaluation and pertinent for effective literature review writing.…”