An Analysis Of Chinese English Majors' Comprehension Of Functions Of Authorial Stance Markers In Chinese And English Hard News Reporting

News stories basically fall into two types, hard news and soft news. The former one generally refers to news and events involving war, economics, and politics; whilst the latter one mainly provides human-interest stories related, more often than not, to entertainment and sports. Hard news is a kind of genre which is traditionally regarded as seldom involving authorial stance. However, research has found that this is not the case, in that hard news reportages involve journalists'implicit or explicit vantage points and, more importantly, their stance towards certain people, entity, event or state of affaires. This kind of study has already received lots of attention in foreign academia, in that these stance markers can not only serve to express ideas or to reflect experience, but also be a significant means to construct interpersonal relations and to transmit ideologies.Chinese English majors stand in the frontier of receiving and transmitting English knowledge as well as culture. Their capacities in identifying and understanding authorial stance are highly relevant to the improvement of their language proficiency and, more importantly, to the correct construction of their stance while reading western newspapers. However, this sort of investigation has not yet received its due attention in the Chinese learned society, in that there are few academic papers or monographs on this topic in the literature. The majority of relevant research is conducted within academic discourse, and other genres such as legal, medical and hard news discourse have not yet been well explored. Moreover, there is even less research relating to identification and comprehension of these markers by Chinese learners of English in hard news reporting. The present thesis is a tentative research of this issue.Appraisal Theory, aiming at investigating how language resources are adopted to construct interpersonal relations, has been well applied in analysis of diversified discourses and was proved to be useful and valid. Appraisal framework was employed in this thesis to identify target authorial stance markers and to analyze their function. Based upon these analyses, some testing batteries were designed to check the participants'performance in recognizing and understanding of authorial stance.Paper-and-pencil tests were deployed to examine participants'identification of target authorial stance markers, while interviews were adopted to figure out factors that may hinder their comprehension of these markers. The results revealed that, generally speaking, these English majors performed not well in indentifying and understanding of stance, in that only 6 out of 42 students have achieved the set score of pass; that they performed better in the identification of positive and explicit markers than negative and implicit ones; that amidst three functions identified in this research, participants did better in pinning down the ideational function than the interpersonal function than the textual function; that these English majors did not receive adequate exposure of English newspapers, and it seems that their less successful job in the test could be well explained by their limited vocabulary and insufficient background information concerning hard news.The findings of this research may shed light on the expression of authorial stance in writing by second language learners. However, there also exist many limitations. First, the framework of Appraisal theory is by no means perfect for purposes of analyses of authorial stance, and some theoretical issues such as how to identify appraisal resources have not been adequately addressed. Second, items of stance markers of three subsystems of Appraisal resources are not evenly designed and thus comparison of identification of these markers could only be regarded as an exploratory analysis. Third, it is hard to state that the limited number of participants in this study could be representative enough and the findings could be generalized to the whole population of English majors in China, because participants in this research come from one same university and stay in the same year. Thus, some more significant findings could be possible, if comparison were made among Chinese English majors in different years, between students of different majors, and across universities. Lastly, this present study is confined to hard news reporting, and does not involve comparison of students'identification of authorial stance markers across genres.