Stance and Culture: A Comparative Study of English and Persian Authorial Stance in Applied Linguistics Research Articles

Abstract

This study tended to investigate the effect of culture, as depicted in language, on the use of stance in the applied linguistics research articles of two groups: native speakers of Persian, and native speakers of English. The two corpora comprising the discussion sections of forty research articles from reliable journals were compared for amounts and types of stance. In order to find the cultural differences between native Persian and English researchers, the subtypes of stance devices adapted from Hyland's (2005b) model were used. Results showed that the groups used stance markers differently; more specifically, they employed hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions differently. Furthermore, culture affects stance features as the meta-discourse devices employed by the researchers in writing the research article genre. The findings have implications for EFL learners and novice non-native writers to know the conventions and patterns as thinking devices for effective writing in academic communities of articles.

The Use of Metadiscourse Markers in the Academic Writing of Hard and Soft Domains

“…The ethnolinguistic factors were explored by Hashemi and Hosseini (2019) to investigate the effect of culture on adopting a stance in the applied linguistics research articles of two groups: native speakers of Persian and native speakers of English based on Hyland's (2005) model. The findings revealed varied use of stance markers, whereby hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions were utilized differently.…”

Pre-service EFL teachers’ language awareness and ideologies about stance: A phenomenographic study

“…Scholars have thus turned attention to students' thinking about stances. Cultural perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies preferring texts without authorial intrusion and/or with authoritative stances have been identified as underpinning some of these difficulties in writers of different language backgrounds (Chang, 2016;El-Dakhs et al, 2020;Hashemi & Hosseini, 2019;Liu & Huang, 2017;Perales-Escudero, 2021;Perales-Escudero & Sandoval, 2021;Zhang & Zhang, 2022). Specifically, Moreno (2021, p. 3) states that Spanish researchers "tend to be less evaluative of their own and others' work" for cultural reasons and transfer this trend to their EFL writing.…”

“…Addressing these questions is relevant to both local and global audiences considering recurrent findings showing stance-related difficulties across ESL/EFL student populations of several nationalities and L1 backgrounds (Chang, 2016;El-Dakhs et al, 2020;Hashemi & Hosseini, 2019;Jou, 2019;Liu & Huang, 2017;Perales-Escudero, 2021;Perales-Escudero & Sandoval, 2021;Zhang & Zhang, 2022). Therefore, the findings of this study may be usefully extrapolated by teachers and scholars working with diverse groups of students in international contexts.…”