The Use Of Evidentials In Chinese Learners’ English Academic Writing

As an important linguistic means denoting source of information and negotiating interpersonal functions,evidentiality markers(i.e.,evidentials)are widely used in academic prose.Different types of evidentials,indicating both information source and the author’s assessment towards the reliability of the information,carry different interpersonal functions through different linguistic realizations.However,no studies have been devoted to describing systematically how evidentials are used in Chinese EFL learners’ academic writing.This study aims to investigate the use of evidentials in Chinese EFL students’ thesis writing and to compare the performances of bachelor students,master students and doctoral students concerning the use of evidentials.Based on previous analytical models on evidentiality,the researcher calculates the occurrences of four types of evidentials and examines corresponding linguistic realizations in two self-compiled corpora.The expert corpus comprising 10 articles randomly selected from three prestigious journals(Language Learning,Applied Linguistics,Studies in Second Language Acquisition)is used as the norm to identify a general pattern of Chinese EFL students’ use of different types of evidentials.The student corpus consists of 25 graduation theses written by Chinese EFL students(10 BA theses,10 MA theses and 5 PhD dissertations).When the distribution of evidentials in BA,MA,and PhD theses is investigated,the three student corpora stand alone.With manual coding and statistical analysis,the present study yielded the following findings:With respect to the general use of evidentials by Chinese EFL students,the findings are multifold.Firstly,the overall occurrences of evidentials are quite close in Chinese EFL students’ theses and expert writers’ articles,indicating that Chinese EFL students employ evidentials as frequently as expert writers do in academic writing.Secondly,as in expert writing,reporting evidentials and inferring evidentials far outnumber sensory evidentials and belief evidentials in student writing.Thirdly,major differences are detected concerning the use of each type of evidentials by student writers and expert writers.Specifically,Chinese EFL students tend to overuse sensory evidentials and reporting evidentials and underuse belief evidentials and inferring evidentials.Contextual analysis also reveals gaps between Chinese EFL students and expert writers in linguistic choices to realize different types of evidentiality.Compared with expert writers,Chinese EFL students tend to rely more on direct linguistic resources(such as raw data from interviews)and neutral expressions to avoid personal involvement or voice in making claims.Regarding the use of evidentials by Chinese bachelor students,master students and doctoral students,different types of evidentials display different patterns.Generally,significant differences were found between BA theses and MA theses.Specifically,Chinese master students tend to employ all of the four types of evidentials less frequently in their theses than Chinese bachelor students.Chinese doctoral students use more reporting and inferring evidentials and less sensory evidentials than master students and the two groups of students adopt a close number of belief evidentials in their thesis writing.Speaking of linguistic realizations of different types of evidentiality,bachelor students tend to overuse or even wrongly use certain evidentials due to limited language proficiency and inadequacy of academic literacy.Though master students tend to underuse certain evidentials as the statistics shows,their ability to use evidentials properly has improved.PhD students resemble expert writers most among the three groups,while sometimes lean to hypercorrection.The significance of the present study is twofold.Theoretically,it enhances our knowledge of the linguistic phenomenon of evidentiality by analyzing evidentiality markers in Chinese EFL students’ academic writing.Pedagogically,it provides empirical evidence for English academic writing courses and arouses EAP instructors’and Chinese EFL learners’ awareness of the importance of evidentiality markers in academic writing.