stance-taking

Recent research has shown that academic writing is not ‘author-evacuated’ but, rather, carries a representation of the writers’ identity. One way through which writers project their identity in academic writing is stance-taking toward propositions advanced in the text. Appropriate stance-taking has proved to be challenging for novice writers of Research Articles (RAs), especially those writing in a foreign language. To contribute to the literature on stance-taking, the present study compared the move-based use of evaluative resources in the introduction section of L1 (written by native English speakers) and L2 (written by Iranian, non-native writers) English RAs in the discipline of Applied Linguistics. To this end, 100 English Research Article Introductions (RAIs), 50 by L1 writers and 50 by L2 writers, were investigated as the corpus of the study. Categories of analysis were taken from Appraisal framework (Martine & White, 2005) and CARS model (Swales, 2004). The results revealed that the two groups of texts were not substantially different in the overall use of appraisal resources in the whole body of RAIs. However, more detailed analyses of the specific categories of appraisal in each of the rhetorical moves demonstrated that in some cases, especially in moves 1 and 3, L1 and L2 writers made different choices when taking a stance. The findings of this study can serve as a valuable source providing a practical and comprehensive understanding of the use of evaluative resources in RAIs for EAP researchers, teachers, and other professionals involved in the teaching of academic writing.

This study explores how professional and student writers manifest their authorial identities and project their gender voices in their academic texts. To this end, 38 male-authored and 38 female-authored articles published in seven leading international journals were selected. Moreover, 38 articles written by male students and 38 articles authored by female students were collected from two universities in Iran. Taking an academic writing course, these students handed in their papers as term projects. These academic writings were analyzed based on Hyland’s metadiscourse framework comprising two major resources: interactional and interactive metadiscourse resources. The findings indicated the male authors mainly attended to discourse organization using more interactive resources while the female authors mostly solicited solidarity by employing more interactional resources. The professional authors engaged in a more critical stance using self-mentions and attitude markers and the students focused on discourse organization. Attitude markers and self-mentions, as markers of stance-taking, were absent in the students’ writing. The professional authors made use of their gender identity to promote their authorial identity instead of suppressing it. These results suggest that EAP programs should inform students how to employ both metadiscourse resources and their gender-based discourse choices to express their authorial identity more effectively.