A Corpus-based Study Of Stance Construction Of Second Language Writers In Academic Writing

In recent years,more and more attention has been paid to the stance construction of the writers in academic writing in linguistics and related disciplines.With the increasingly frequent international academic exchanges,how to reasonably express the writer’s stance and construct the identity has gradually become an important topic in the study of second language writing.The construction of academic stance not only requires the objective exposition of academic facts,but also requires the reasonable expression of the writer’s academic stance in the paper writing,so as to realize the effective social interaction between the writer and the readers.There have been many studies on the writer’s stance construction in the abstract and conclusion part of academic papers.However,the discussion part of the academic paper is the most suitable place for the writer to present the research results,deduce the research findings,and express research views.Therefore,this paper mainly explores the writer’s stance construction in the discussion part of academic papers,aiming to fill the research gap in this aspect,enrich the research results,and provide reference for the teaching of second language writing.In this paper,the author constructed two comparative corpora based on 34 articles published by professional writers in recent two years collected from Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics and 63 graduation theses of senior English majors of a 211 University in Beijing as corpus sources.Based on Biber et al.(1999)’s classification method of stance markers,this paper mainly conducts quantitative and qualitative research and analysis on the characteristics of three stance expression methods in academic writing,namely,stance modals,adverbials and complements.This study firstly tagged the corpus text with CLAWS web tagger,retrieved the stance markers with AntConc,and obtained the frequency distribution.Then,Chi-square test was used to measure the difference among the frequency distribution data.This study found out the answers to the following questions:(1)Frequency distribution of stance modals in the two corpora;(2)Frequency distribution of stance adverbials in the two corpora;(3)Frequency distribution of stance complements in the two corpora;(4)The differences of the authorial stances constructed.The results of the study show that,in general,the total number of stance markers used by professional writers and undergraduates is not significantly different,but the number of three types of stance markers used is quite different.Professional writers tend to use more stance complements,while undergraduates tend to use more stance modals,and the frequency difference of stance adverbials is less significant.Through the use of three kinds of stance markers,professional writers have constructed more objective and credible identities and managed to achieve positive interaction with readers.However,due to the limitation of language ability and insufficient understanding of the functions of stance markers,the authorial stance constructed by undergraduates is a little subjective and undiversified.Through the research,this paper found out the characteristics and differences between professional writers and undergraduates in the use of stance markers and revealed the defects of undergraduates in the construction of authorial stance through comparative analysis.The study provided some references and suggestions for the teaching of second language writing,especially the teaching of second language academic writing for college students.