Abstract:
This study aims to understand how novice English foreign language (EFL) writers express their stance and attitude in essay writing using Ken Hyland’s model of stance and engagement (2005). Adopting a corpus-based approach to analysis, we have examined four stance features—hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions—in a learner-driven corpus of 532 essays collected from the PYP students in a university in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over a period of three years. Our results indicate an overuse of boosters and an underuse of the attitudinal markers. It also shows how student writing relies on a few recurrent patterns to express stance in writing. Keeping the findings in view, we suggest a few implications for teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) courses to PYP students.