Evaluative stance in master's theses discussion sections: the case of Iranian graduate student writers

Abstract

Presenting the writer's voice and positioning it within the larger body of alternative voices is essential in academic writing. Realizing the challenges novice academic writers might experience while doing this, we selected and analyzed a corpus of 40 discussion chapters (timespan: 2010-2019) written by Iranian master's students. Following systemic functional perspective (Martin & White, 2005), we explored the engagement resources in the corpus to discover evaluative language choices and stance types. The results showed that although student writers actively engaged other voices and adopted a more balanced dialogically contractive and expansive stance, they employed fewer and less diverse linguistic devices. Moreover, these novice writers tended to avoid certainty and preferred more modest and cautious assertions. There was a great tendency to remain neutral toward other voices. In aligning with other voices, they preferred to present more supportive evaluations than critical ones as well as more explicit structures. They opted for implicit attitudes in evoking resources to show criticism. The implication of this study is for EAP and dissertation writing to novice writers.

Keywords

• academic writing
• appraisal theory
• engagement
• discussion chapter
• novice writers