This study investigates how linguistic devices are used to convey authorial stance in 36 Introduction sections and 36 Discussion sections of doctoral dissertations written in English by Thai students graduated in language education from different universities in the United States during the period 2008 to 2013. It also compares the use of authorial stance in the two sections. A concordance program called 'AntConc' was used to detect authorial stance based on Hyland (2005)'s framework. The results of an independent sample t-test revealed that there were some sectional differences in the amounts, types, and functions of authorial stance. Pedagogical implications for EAP/ESP instruction and recommendations for further research are provided in light of empirical data.

This paper investigates the use of politeness strategies in 32 discussion sections of research papers produced by Thai graduate students at Graduate School of Language and Communication, National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA), Bangkok, Thailand. The study reported in this paper adopts Brown and Levinson's (1978Levinson's ( , 1987 and Myers' (1989) models of politeness strategies. The project as a whole aims to identify what politeness strategies are most commonly used in the whole corpus, whether differences exist in the use of these politeness strategies and how politeness strategies are employed. The analysis of the data reveals that these student researchers rarely employed politeness strategies in their discussions. However, they used more negative politeness strategies than the positive ones and the differences in the use of these two strategies were highly significant. This study provides some pedagogical implications for ESL/EFL academic writing and syllabus designing.

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