No abstract

English as foreign language (EFL) writers are often found to have weaker control of their academic writing, among which presenting an effective authorial stance has been reported as particularly challenging (Hyland, 1998a; Schleppegrell, 2004). In particular, student writers tended to deploy a stronger stance and be less effective with tentative claims. The study investigated a small group of EFL doctoral students’ conceptions, which, as hypothesized, may affect their presentation of stance in academic arguments. Twelve doctoral candidates were recruited from two disciplines, soft and hard sciences. They answered questions and made judgments related to authorial stance, adapted into two ‘extreme’ versions, assertive and tentative, in academic texts taken from both domain-specific and domain-neutral journal articles. The results revealed that the doctoral participants’ conceptions pertained to three dimensions, Stance as linguistic construct, as cognitive or behavioural entity and as institutional norm. Their conceptions generally lacked sophistication and depth and instead were reductive and polarized. Assertive claims obtained more favourable considerations than tentative claims, and students from both disciplines varied considerably in their views of language. The results can inform academic stance instruction to allow for more exposure to nuanced presentations of stance and engagement with explicit discussions of the nuances of stance-taking.

Presenting a persuasive authorial stance is a major challenge for second language (L2) writers in writing academic research. Failure to present an effective authorial stance often results in poor evaluation, which compromises a writer's research potential. This study proposes a ''textlinguistic'' approach to advanced academic writing to complement a typical corpus approach that is oriented toward exploring lexico-grammatical patterns at the sentence level. A web-based stance corpus was developed which allowed the users to study both the linguistic realizations of stance at clause/sentence level and how stance meanings are made at the rhetorical move level. The assumptions the study tested included: (1) whether a textlinguistic approach assists L2 writers to polish their research argument particularly as a result of improved stance deployment, and (2) whether the web-based corpus tool affords a constructivist environment which prompts the learners to infer linguistic patterns to attain deeper understanding. Seven L2 doctoral students in the social sciences were recruited. The results indicate a positive relationship between writing performance and more accurate use of stance. However, the application of higher order cognitive skills (e.g., inferring and verifying) was infrequent in the corpus environment. Instead, the writers used more lower-level cognitive skills (e.g., making sense and exploring) to learn. The participants accessed the integrated ''context examples'' most frequently to guide their learning, followed by rhetorical ''move examples'' and clause-based ''stance examples''. This suggests that the learning of stance is critically contingent on the surrounding contexts. Overall, the study reveals that effective authorial stance-taking plays a critical role in effective academic argument. To better assist L2 academic writers, incorporating more (con)textual examples in computer corpora tools is recommended.

For many EFL learners, listening poses a grave challenge. The difficulty in segmenting a stream of speech and limited capacity in short-term memory are common weaknesses for language learners. Specifically, reduced forms, which frequently appear in authentic informal conversations, compound the challenges in listening comprehension. Numerous interventions have been implemented to assist EFL language learners, and of these, the application of captions has been found highly effective in promoting learning. Few studies have examined how different modes of captions may enhance listening comprehension. This study proposes three modes of captions: full, keyword-only, and annotated keyword captions and investigates their contribution to the learning of reduced forms and overall listening comprehension. Forty-four EFL university students participated in the study and were randomly assigned to one of the three groups. The results revealed that all three groups exhibited improvement on the pre-test while the annotated keyword caption group exhibited the best performance with the highest mean score. Comparing performances between groups, the annotated keyword caption group also emulated both the full caption and the keyword-only caption groups, particularly in the ability to recognize reduced forms. The study sheds light on the potential of annotated keyword captions in enhancing reduced forms learning and overall listening comprehension.