“I Humbly Believe That…”: Stance Expression in L2 Student and Expert Writing in Linguistics
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Chapter in a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In academic writing, stance is the expression of a writer’s attitude, commitment, and presence. How stance is expressed by expert writers across disciplines and linguacultural backgrounds remains a popular area of research; however, relatively little attention has been given to student writing at the PhD level, which may create challenges for teachers when developing new materials and courses. To address this gap, in this chapter, I report on a study exploring stance expression by L2 doctoral students and expert writers in theses and research articles in linguistics. The aim is to compare writers’ stance in three corpora of introductions—by Czech doctoral students, academics with English as L1, and academics with English as L2. Quantitative and qualitative corpus-based analysis of stance features was conducted based on Hyland’s (2005b) model of stance. Overall, stance features were found to occur with greater frequency in the student corpus than the expert corpora, with a notable difference in the number of self-mentions and boosters. Student writers also displayed a preference for hedges and boosters rarely used by expert writers. The findings suggest that students’ expertise in academic writing, linguacultural background, and genre expectations all influence their use of stance features to a certain extent. |
| Related projects: |