Linguistic markers of stance in essay writing: a corpus-based study of EFL student writing

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.