There are however some limitations in the current study. First, although the three corpora collected are considered formal academic writing, they are of different genre.
While the expert writings were from journal articles at shorter length, student writings were extracted from theses at longer length. Although the variance between the two genres may have caused the frequencies to differ, NNS-J and NNS-S in fact showed a relatively close correspondence in overall distribution of stance usage.
Second, evaluated entity was not considered in the scope of current study analysis. This area is not attended since it’s difficult to manually read through every text to specify if the proposition following that is related to prior research or writers’
own study. Furthermore, as the only person who read and checked all transcript contexts in the concordancer, there might be some misinterpretations on certain stance meanings, and thus counted the frequency of occurrence not as correctly. Lastly, the corpus size used in the current study is rather small to generalize the stance pattern.
Based on the findings and the limitations of the current research, some suggestions are proposed in the section below.
5.4 Suggestions for Future Research
To further the scope of research, native student thesis writings should also be included in the database to reach a balanced and in-depth investigation. With the inclusion of native students’ writing examples, we can explore if native students exhibit similar usage pattern as the L2 students, and examine the reason behind such mismatch. In addition, it might be better to consider all usage patterns of modals, adverbials and extraposed clauses to fully reveal the overall extent that writes express stance in research reports.
Another suggestion is the thorough examination on evaluative entity, as it offers important message regarding what writers comment on. We can further detect whether the proposition commonly refers to writers’ own findings or concerns the work of others. Providing complete analysis may help academic writing instructors to offer L2 students proper assistance in refining their writing quality.
Future studies are also suggested to explore stance use in the writing of different academic disciplines and by writers of various first language backgrounds. Previous studies have revealed that each discipline hold varying value system and thus employ different stance markers to construct their voice in academic prose (Charles, 2006;
2007; Hyland, 2004; 2005; Hyland & Tse, 2005a). More studies regarding stance usage pattern should be conducted and help to provide deeper insights for EAP instruction.
REFERENCE
Adams, H., & Quintana-Toledo, E. (2013). Adverbial stance marking in the introduction and conclusion sections of legal research articles. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas, 8, pp. 18-35.
Ai, H. (2012). The expression of stance in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study of stance adverbs. International Journal of Asian Language Processing, 22(1), pp.
1-14.
Biber, D. (2004). Historical patterns for the grammatical marking of stance: A cross-register comparison. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 5(1), pp.
107-136.
Biber, D. (2006). Stance in spoken and writen university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, pp. 97-116.
Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1988). Adverbial stance types in English. Discourse Processes, 11, pp. 1-34.
Biber, D., & Gray, B. (2013). 5 Nominalizing the verb phrase in academic science writing. The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora, 99
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. New York: Longman.
Casanava, C. (2003). Looking ahead to more sociopolitically-oriented case study research in L2 writing scholarship (But should it be called "post-process"?).
Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, pp. 85-102.
Charles, M. (2006). The construction of stance in reporting clauses: A
cross-disciplinary study of theses. Applied Linguistics, 27(3), pp. 492-518.
Charles, M. (2007). Argument or evidence? Disciplinary variation in the use of the Noun that pattern in stance construction. English for Specific purposes, 26(2),
pp. 203-218.
Chen, Z. (2012). Expression of Epistemic Stance in EFL Chinese University Students' Writing. English Language Teaching, 5(10), pp. 173-179.
Connor, U. (2002). New Directions in Contrastive Rhetoric. TESOL Quarterly, 36(4), pp. 493-510.
Cortes, V. (2004). Lexical bundles in published and student disciplinary writing:
Examples from history and biology. English for Specific Purposes, 23(4), pp.
397-423.
Fløttum, K. (2012). Variation of Stance and Voice across Cultures. In K. Hyland, & C.
Sancho Guinda, Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres (pp. 218-231).
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gilbert, G. (1977). Referencing as Persuasion. Social Studies of Science, 7(1), pp.
113-122.
Granath, S. (2001). Is that a fact?: A corpus study of the syntax and semantics of the fact that. Rayson, Paul, Wilson, Andrew, McEnery, Tony, Hardie, Andrew &
Shereen Khoja (red) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2001 Conference, Presenterad vid: Corpus Linguistics 2001.
Granger, S. (1998). Learner English on computer. London: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.
Gray, B., & Biber, D. (2012). Current Conceptions of Stance. In K. Hyland, & C.
Sancho Guinda, Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres (pp. 15-33).
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Henderson, A., & Barr, R. (2010). Comparing indicators of authorial stance in psychology students’writing and published research articles. Journal of Writing Research, 2 (2), pp. 245-264.
Hewings, A. (2012). Stance and Voice in Academic Discourse across Channels. In K.
Hyland , & C. Sancho Guinda, Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres (pp. 187-201). New York : Palgrave Macmillan.
Hood, S. (2004). Appraising Research: Taking a Stance in Academic Writing.
(Doctoral dissertation). Sydney: University of Technology.
Hood, S. (2012). Voice and Stance as APPRAISAL: Persuading and Positioning in Research Writing across Intellectual Fields. In K. Hyland, & C. Sancho Guinda, Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres (pp. 51-68). New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Hu, G., & Cao, F. (2011). Hedging and boosting in abstracts of applied linguistics articles: A comparative study of English-and Chinese-medium journals.
Journal of Pragmatics, 43(11), pp. 2795-2809.
Hyland, K. (1998). Boosting, hedging and the negotiation of academic knowledge.
TEXT, 18(3), pp. 349-382.
Hyland, K. (1999). Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 20(3), pp. 341-367.
Hyland, K. (2002a). Directives: Argument and Engagement in Academic Writing.
Applied Linguistics, 23(2), pp. 215-239.
Hyland, K. (2002b). Options of identity in academic writing. ELT Journal, 56 (4), pp.
351-358.
Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary interactions: Metadiscourse in L2 postgraduate writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13(2), pp. 133-151.
Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), pp. 173-192.
Hyland, K., & Guinda, C. S. (Eds.). (2012). Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hyland, K., & Tse. P. (2005a). Evaluative that constructions: Signaling stance in
research abstracts. Functions of Language, 12(1), pp. 39–63.
Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2005b). Hooking the reader: a corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts. English for specific purposes, 24(2), pp. 123-139.
Kuntjara, E. (2004). Cultural Transfer in EFL Writing: A Look at Contrastive Rhetoric on English and Indonesian. K@ta, 6(1), pp. 13-29.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. (2005). The language of evaluation. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McCready, E., & Ogata, N. (2007). Evidentiality, modality and probability.
Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(2), pp. 147-206.
McGrath, L., & Kuteeva, M. (2012). Stance and engagement in pure mathematics research articles: Linking discourse features to disciplinary practices. English for Specfic Purposes, 31, pp. 161-173.
Morley, D. (2007). The Cambridge introduction to creative writing. Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1989). Language has a heart. Text, 9(1), pp. 7-25.
Paradis, C. (2003). Between epistemic modality and degree: the case of really. Topics in English Linguistics, 44, pp. 191-222.
Parkinson, J. (2013). Adopting academic values: Student use of that-complement clauses in academic writing. System, 41, pp. 428-442.
Precht, K. (2003). Great vs. Lovely: Stance Differences in American and British English. Language and Computer, 46(1), pp. 133-151.
Precht, K. (2008). Sex similarities and differences in stance in informal American conversation. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(1), pp. 89-111.
Rass, R. (2011). Cultural Transfer as an Obstable for Writing Well in English: The Case of Arabic Speakers Writing in English. English Language Teaching, 4(2), pp. 206-212.
Schmitt, N. (2010). Researching Vocabulary: A Vocabulary Research Manual.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Scott, M. (2004). The Wordsmith Tools (V.5.0). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Silver, M. (2012). Voice and Stance across Disciplines in Academic Discourse. In K.
Hyland, & C. Sancho Guinda, Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres (pp. 202-217). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2004). Academic writing for graduate students:
Essential tasks and skills (Vol. 1). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Thompson, G., & Ye, Y. (1991). Evaluation in the reporting verbs used in academic papers. Applied linguistics, 12(4), 365-382.
Tseronis, A. (2009). Qualifying standpoints. Stance adverbs as a presentational device for managing the burden of proof. LOT, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics, Utrecht.
Vázquez Orta, I. (2010). A contrastive analysis of the use of modal verbs in the expression of epistemic stance in Business Management research articles in English and Spanish. Ibérica, 19, pp. 77-95.
Wang, Y., & Chen, H. (2012). The Stance Study of Evaluative That Clauses in English Abstracts of Chinese Master Theses. International Journal of English
Linguistics, 2(5), pp. 11.
Wharton, S. (2012). Epistemological and interpersonal stance in a data description task: Findings from a discipline-specific learner corpus. English for Specific Purposes, 31, pp. 261-270.
Xing, M., Wang, J., & Spencer, K. (2008). Raising students' awareness of
cross-cultural contrastive rhetoric in English writing via an e-learning course.
Language Learning & Technology, 12(2), pp. 71-93.
Xu, J. (2009). Log-likelihood ratio calculator. Beijing: National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education.
Zarei, G., & Mansoori, S. (2011). Metadiscursive Distinction between Persian and English: An Analysis of Computer Engineering Research Articles. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2(5), pp. 1037-1042.
王敏 (2011)。基於語料庫的中國大學生學術論文寫作中立場標記語的研究。海
外英語，5，295-297。
徐宏亮 (2011)。中國高級英語學習者學術語篇中的作者立場標記語的使用特點:
一項基於語料庫的對比研究。外語教學，32(6)，44-48。
APPENDIX
NS-J NNS-J NNS-S
NS-J NNS-J NNS-S
Marker Nor. freq Text % Nor. freq Text % Nor. freq Text %
suggest v 92.01 96% 68.15 92% 56.86 100%
surprising adj 3.27 18% - - - -
tell v 2.97 20% - - - -
think v - - 11.67 24% 18.87 76%
view n 3.86 24% - - - -