Linguistic Markers of Stance and Genre in Upper-Level Student Writing

Abstract

Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing to date has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between two important genre families in higher education-persuasive argumentative writing and analytic explanatory writing-based on corpus linguistic analysis of late undergraduate and early graduate-level writing in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The specific stance markers in the study, both epistemic and textual cues, have been shown to distinguish student writing across levels; this study, then, extends the analysis to consider the comparative use of these markers across genres. The findings show two stance expectations persistent across genres as well as significant distinctions between argumentative and explanatory writing vis-à-vis stance markers that intensify and contrast. The findings thus point to important considerations for instruction, assignment design, and future research.

Shaping Writing Grades

“…The Element promotes the use of advanced statistical techniques to understand how aspects of collocation may contribute to grade allocation and ultimately facilitate students' task completion and achievement of FYC programme goals. This Element supports the work of other scholars who have stated that language support should be embedded into FYC student learning, and more broadly FYC programme outcomes and frameworks (e.g., Aull, 2015Aull, , 2017Aull, , 2019Eckstein & Ferris, 2018).…”

“…Considering these shortcomings, FYC researchers have started to adopt more corpus-based approaches to researching language use by FYC writers (e.g., Aull, 2017Aull, , 2019Eckstein & Ferris, 2018). For example, Aull (2017) examines the variation in language use across FYC genres with a corpus of USF texts by looking at differences in the keywords that each genre's texts contain.…”

Quantifying Disciplinary Voices: An Automated Approach to Interactional Metadiscourse in Successful Student Writing

“…This is a notably higher proportion than those of other disciplines (reports make up 44% of the entire corpus), and it might be in fact a clear reflection of assignment trends in this discipline that focus on reporting empirical processes. More importantly, a recent study by Aull (2019) examined occurrences of stance markers in MICUSP across different genres and showed little genre effect on the frequencies of interpersonal stance markers (hedges and boosters), suggesting that successful student writers are highly aware of the importance of expressing epistemic stance regardless of genre. For these reasons, our aim in this article is not to examine genre variation, but rather to highlight similarities and differences in interactional markers across disciplines.…”

A Corpus-Based Comparative Stylometry of Both Sexes in Pakistani Editorials Amidst Stance Markers

“…Since students' writers are shown to differ by their usage of particular stance markers, the above Global Social Sciences Review (GSSR) paper investigated how well these markers are used across different types of writing. Significant steps for the layout of guidance and assignments, as well as continued studies, have been identified as a result of these observations (Aull, 2019). Following Hyland's paradigm of stance, Shen and Tao (2021) studied the distribution of stance markers in two distinct genres: clinical research papers and journalism opinion articles.…”