EFL Doctoral Students’ Conceptions of Authorial Stance in Academic Research Writing: An Exploratory Study

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.

Keywords

EFL doctoral students conceptions authorial stance academic research argument discipline

Introduction

To participate as a member of the academic community, effective argumentation is essential. Meeting this goal has been a grave challenge for second or foreign language writers, who are commonly found to have weaker control of their academic writing in multiple aspects. Scholars have suggested that knowledge of academic research writing often remains implicit to the writers (Leki et al., 2006), and usually involves multiple aspects of know-how, i.e. linguistic, rhetoric, and topic knowledge (Castello et al., 2009).

Research writing is a social, situated practice (Aitchison and Lee, 2006) and usually follows conventionalized ways of communication, which also varies across disciplines. Different from academic writing at college level, research writing presumes ‘an on-going, developing solution to a rhetorical problem’ (Atkinson, 1992: 341), a knowledge-making process grounded ‘in specific social circumstances’ (Hyland, 1998a: 25). Specifically, in research writing, a fine equilibrium is usually expected whereby the author maintains a persona projected both as an expert-knower and a disciplinary servant (Martin and White, 2005). A number of scholars (e.g. Dressen-Hammouda, 2014; Hyland, 1998a; Lancaster, 2014; Schleppegrell, 2004; Wu, 2007; Zhao and Llosa, 2008) have proposed that the ability to strike a convincing authorship may have an impact on the quality of an academic argument.

In the following discussion, the complex construct of authorial stance is first explicated, followed by the report of challenges associated with stance-taking in past research. The hypothesis associated with the causes of the challenges is then presented.

The Construct of Stance

The study of stance is inspired by a multiplicity of theoretical and methodological orientations. Stance encompasses a wide range of notions including Appraisal, Attitude, Epistemic Modality, Metadiscourse, and Voice (Wharton, 2012), and can be operationalized under different labels (e.g. ‘evaluation’ [Hunston and Thompson, 2000], ‘interactional resources’ [Thompson, 2001], ‘epistemic’, and ‘attitudinal’ stance [Biber, 2006], interpersonal meanings, including ‘evidentiality’, ‘affect’, and ‘relation’ [Hyland, 1998b], ‘hedge’ and ‘booster’ [Hyland, 1998a, Hyland, 2004, Hyland, 2006], ‘stance/engagement’ [Hyland, 2005], ‘voice’ [Dressen-Hammouda, 2014; Tardy, 2012; Thompson, 2012], and ‘stance’ [Gray and Biber, 2012; Lancaster, 2014]). Wharton aptly generalized three main domains of stance drawn on the previous research: epistemic, attitudinal and dialogic. Epistemic stance entails ‘stances as to truth, certainty’; attitudinal stance refers to the ‘feelings and value judgements’; and the ‘dialogic’ domain concerns ‘the extent to which authors acknowledge the possibility of alternative positions’ (Wharton, 2012: 262). To be effective and convincing, a variety of linguistic expressions should be deployed to communicate authorial stance.

Stance-taking Performance of Student Writers

It has been revealed that both L1 and L2 writers across college and post-graduate levels exhibit difficulties in deploying appropriate stance (Hood, 2006; Lancaster, 2014; Hyland, 2005; Hyland and Milton, 1997; Wu, 2007). Among all, one recurrent and salient issue concerns the problematic deployment of doubt and certainty in presenting stance. Investigating native and second language (L2) student writers’ performance of expressing claims of different strengths, Hyland and Milton (1997) found that Cantonese L2 writers are less effective in delivering certainty and show inappropriately stronger commitments. Wharton (2012) reported that bare assertions are most frequent among non-native undergraduates in the discipline of statistics. Similarly, conducting close text analysis of a group of L2 doctoral students, Chang and Schleppegrell (2011) also found that these students preferred assertions to tune up their argument in their research writing. Lancaster (2014) argued that less experienced writers tended to resort to bare assertions to bluntly pronounce their views, whereas more experienced writers were more strategic and more effective. They were able to present a convincing argument first by entertaining a range of perspectives, which were then closed down to accentuate the perspective they hoped to endorse. A similar finding was described in Wu’s study (2007), in which the lower performers also used bare assertions more than the higher performers.

By contrast, investigations of published academic articles revealed otherwise. A higher number of tentative tokens were observed in published articles (i.e. hedges) than assertive tokens (i.e. boosters) (Hyland, 1998a; Hyland, 2012). Despite the finding to the contrary, tentative meanings are considered inherently more challenging and call for the ability to mobilize a wide range of linguistic resources ‘graded on a cline’ (Vassileva, 2001:84). The wider range of linguistic resources can range from probability, modality, frequency, approximators of quantity, to relativity, whereas stating facts and making assertions may be much more straightforward (Martin-Martin, 2004).

Speculations on why student writers tend to be ineffective in deploying their stance are few and varied in perspective. Some scholars proposed that non-native speakers may possess quite different beliefs regarding how knowledge claims should be proposed (e.g. Aikenhead and Otsuji, 2000; Dole and Sinatra, 1994; Tsai, 2004) and prefer a different set of rhetorical expressions from the ‘norm’ native speakers of English are used to (Dressen-Hammouda, 2014; Hu and Cao, 2011). Hu and Cao (2011) found that salient differences exist in the way a writer presents an argument, which may result from a culturally preferred way of arguing, epistemological beliefs, or a lack of command of English.

Along this line of thinking, and extending the author’s previous work which reported that L2 doctoral students tended to deploy more assertions than tentative meanings in research arguments (Chang and Schleppegrell, 2011), it was decided that conceptions may play a part in regulating students’ stance-taking performance. Students’ underlying beliefs or conceptions about learning have been demonstrated to affect their academic performance, and the conceptions held by students differ from those of the experts (Aikenhead and Otsuji, 2000; Baxter Magolda, 2002; Dole and Sinatra, 1994; Schommer, 1994). One key principle in investigating students’ conceptions concerns how their conceptions may be qualitatively different, forming a hierarchy of conceptions. In the hierarchy, some of the conceptions may resemble those of the experts, thus considered highly relevant conceptions, while some may be rather basic and precocious (Marton, 1981).

In addition, given that academic writing varies across disciplines (e.g. Hood, 2011; Hyland, 1998a; Samraj, 2008) and that disciplinary assumptions, underpinned by different epistemological factors, may affect the way language is used (e.g. Hyland, 2005; Lonka et al., 1996), the study also investigated disciplinary assumptions in relation to stance deployment. According to Hyland, the different ways discourse communities argue may well be represented through the deployment of authorial stance (2004: 175).

Research Questions

The study investigated EFL doctoral students’ conceptions of authorial stance to offer clues regarding these students’ challenges in authorial stance deployment. The following questions were explored:¹

How are hard science (HS) and soft science (SS) doctoral students’ conceptions of authorial stance different from the concept of stance the experts operationalized in EAP/ESP research or instruction?

To which stance type, assertive or tentative, do the participants attribute more positive and negative conceptions (PCs and NCs)?

How do disciplinary assumptions regulate the participants’ conceptions of authorial stance in academic research writing?

Method

Both semi-structured interviews and judgment of texts were implemented to elicit the participants’ conceptions of assertive and tentative stances. Below, participants’ academic background is presented. Then the procedure and instrument employed in the study is described, followed by the data analysis.

Participants

A total of 12 EFL advanced doctoral students were recruited from national universities in northern Taiwan and evenly divided into soft and hard sciences.² They are all L1 speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Only those who had advanced to candidacy, i.e. from the third year up in the academic pursuit, were recruited. As a result, the year of study ranges from the 3^rd to the 7^th year. On average, they had approximately 4 years of academic writing experience and had taken academic writing courses or attended writing workshops, ranging from as short as one class to one academic year. Table 1 presents the relevant academic background of these participants.

Table 1.

Participants’ Academic Background.

Discipline	No.	Name	Department	Year of study	Year(s) of AW instruction	Year(s) of AW writing experience¹
Soft Sciences	1	Ming	Education	5	0	3
	2	Lo	Psychology	7	0	5
	3	Chien	Linguistics	3	0.5	7
	4	Leo	TESOL	3	1	3
	5	Pei	Geography	3	0.5	3–4
	6	Chia	Human Factor Engineering	7	1	3–4
Hard Sciences	7	Li	Astronomy	7	8 classes	7
	8	Chih	Physics	3	0	2
	9	Han	Physics	5	1 class	5
	10	Yu	Biochemistry	6	0.5	2–3
	11	Dun	Life science	3	0.5	4
	12	Kuey	Applied Math	3	0	3
Range/Ave				3–7	<0.5	4.1

In both English and Chinese.

Procedure and Instrument

The procedure is composed of three phases (Appendix B):

Phase I: Students’ academic background and relevant academic writing experience were elicited (3 questions).

Phase II: General questions regarding academic writing and stance-taking were administered as a warm-up to the main task to follow in Phase III. These questions were meant to elicit students’ knowledge related to stance, e.g. definitions, purposes and functions of authorial stance, making academic argument, and so forth (10 questions).

Phase III: This is the main component of the analysis. Having discussed what they conceived of stance in general, the students were presented with two sets of texts to read. In this phase, they had further opportunities to clarify what they conceived of authorial stance-taking, with the texts at hand to exemplify or support their discussions more concretely. Each participant was asked to read two sets of introductions, a domain-specific (DS) and a domain-neutral (DN) text rendered in two stance versions, assertive and tentative. The adoption of a DN text helped us evaluate the potential variations in the participants’ disciplinary assumptions. After reading, five more questions were administered, related to the stance deployment in the texts.

Texts

The texts were selected from the Introduction sections of three research articles, including two DS topics, respectively catering to SS and HS disciplines, and one DN topic, related to the study of a common social issue.³ The decision to use the Introduction section stemmed from the consideration that this section usually comprises salient rhetorical moves (Swales, 1990; Swales, 2004) and is rich and complex in metadiscoursal resources (Milagros del Saz Rubio, 2011), thus manifesting a rich context for stance investigation.

The three Introduction texts were re-cast into two ‘extreme’ versions, one consistently assertive, and the other, tentative, informed by Martin and White’s Engagement framework (2005) (Appendix A). A subset of the Appraisal system and inspired by Bakhtin’s dialogism (1981), the framework concerns ‘how author-writers project themselves, incorporate and manage different voices or sources of voices in the form of monogloss or heterogloss’ to negotiate for a convincing stance (Chang and Schleppegrell, 2011:142). The framework was chosen for its great potential for diagnosing patterns of stance deployment and, at the same time, as a helpful pedagogical and explanatory tool (for example, see works by Chang and Schleppegrell, 2011; Hood, 2006; Lancaster, 2014; Wu, 2007).

The coding of the stances was a result of identifying stance meanings based on a range of lexicogrammatical items per clause unit (e.g. adverbs and modal verbs). In the two ‘extreme’ versions, some assertive/tentative expressions were manipulated while some were used intact. In the three sets of texts, the social science DS Introduction has a 288 word count, with 14 assertive expressions and 12 tentative expressions respectively in the two versions. For the pure science DS Introduction (456 word count), there are 18 assertive expressions and 18 tentative expressions respectively. For the DN Introduction (356 word count), 15 assertive expressions and 13 tentative expressions were included in the two versions.

Examples of both assertive and tentative versions are shown below (Only one paragraph of the complete introduction is illustrated here).

Version A (the DN Text): The Last Paragraph of the Introduction

Moreover, the emphasis in the literature on gender and stress have clearly shifted towards the development of theoretical perspectives relating to women and stress (e.g. Greenglass; Matuszek, Nelson and Quick). This is because the entry of women into ‘non traditional’/senior organisational positions in developed countries such as the USA and the UK became less topical. In developing countries, however , the entry of women into managerial or senior managerial positions has been profoundly slower . In South Africa, for example, gender discrimination in the workplace has been outlawed only recently with the passing of the Labour Relations Act in 1995 and the Employment Equity Act last year. Similarly, in Taiwan there is anti-discrimination legislation, but it is indeed recent; and while labor laws exist which provide for such things as maternity leave, employers simply do not always grant it. Women have also complained of being forced to quit jobs because of age or child-bearing restrictions, and restrictive quotas notoriously exist within certain occupations. Women obviously receive less frequent promotions and lower salaries than their male counterparts.

In this paragraph, the value-laden adverbs, ‘clearly’, ‘profoundly’, ‘indeed’, ‘simply’, ‘notoriously’ and ‘obviously’, sometimes combined with other assertive lexicogrammatical items, enable an author to contract the dialogic space in favour of the position she or he takes. Similarly, the disclaiming resources, ‘however’ and ‘but’, which can also join other assertive lexicogrammatical items, contract the dialogic space, allowing little room for the readers to negotiate with the author. All combined, the assertive expressions create a sense of urgency in such a brief segment of text.

Similarly, in the tentative version, or version T, the number of entertaining or tentative expressions is rather high.

Version T (the DN text): The Last Paragraph of the Introduction

The entry of women into managerial and professional organisational roles over the last three to four decades has been accompanied by a great amount of research which has examined the impact of this change on the organization, the woman and her family. In particular, the issue of women’s work-related stress has received some attention , beginning in the 1980s. However, the results of the research in this area tended to be inconclusive . A review conducted by Nelson and Quick indicated that employed women experience greater stress than both non-employed women and men because of several unique stressors faced by employed women. Baruch, Biener and Barnett on the other hand, found that non-employed women experience greater stress than employed women, while Martocchio and O’Leary found no differences in experienced and perceived work stress. Future researchers can be advised not to spend time debating the nature of the sex occupational stress relationship when the existence of the relationship can now be the salient issue. Following this assertion, there seems to have been fewer research studies aimed specifically at comparing men and women’s work-related stress.

Here, three types of lexicogrammatical items were found to designate tentative stance: adjective (e.g. ‘inconclusive’ and ‘some’), modal verb (‘can’), and verb (‘seems’ and ‘tended to’). These meanings collaborate to contribute to a tentative stance quite distinct from the assertive text above. The interviews were audio-recorded and administered in Mandarin and were fully transcribed for analysis.

Analysis

To generate conceptions, the phenomenographic approach was adopted (Marton, 1986, Marton, 1994; Saljö, 1979). The approach entails categorization of relevant utterances into qualitatively different and hierarchically related conceptions (Tsai, 2009). It combines interview, protocol and discourse analysis and is ‘frequently used to identify students’ qualitatively different, hierarchically related conceptions of learning’ (Tsai, 2009: 1094). Empirically driven, the approach is iterative in nature and can describe qualitatively variant perceptions or experiences of the phenomenon being studied among a ‘small, purposive sample of subjects’ (Marton and Booth, 1997: 111). The process involves continual sorting and resorting of data, combined with ongoing rounds of comparisons between the data, until relatively stabilized categories of conceptions are reached.

The researcher first extracted key sentences related to conceptions and highlighted the keywords that exemplified the participants’ views. The keywords were then assigned one label, which can represent one conception of authorial stance. Next, similar conceptions were grouped to form a more representative category. For example, the keywords ‘decisive’, ‘confident’, ‘reserved’, ‘cautious’, ‘humble’, and ‘aggressive’ share a higher degree of similarity, denoting writers’ attitude in presenting knowledge claims, and are quite distinct from other keywords. The grouping and re-grouping continued iteratively for a few rounds until the categorization was relatively stabilized.⁴ Inter-rater reliability⁵ was conducted and the agreement was 91% for assertive stance and 96% for tentative stance.⁶ Disagreement was discussed and resolved by the two raters.

This exploratory study inspired a subsequent work (Chang and Tsai, 2014) in which the pool of participants was expanded from the same EFL context and further investigation was conducted related to the role of epistemic beliefs and its tie to the doctoral students’ conceptions.

Results

Three main themes emerged out of the conceptions participants contributed: in the order of relevance: Stance as linguistic construct (thus highest in the hierarchy), Stance as cognitive or behavioural entity, and Stance as institutional norm. Aligned with the hypothesis, tentative claims elicited more NCs while assertive claims elicited more PCs. Regarding how disciplinary assumptions affected the doctoral students’ conceptions, some patterns stood out. First, the SS students were particularly dissatisfied with the language use related to the repetitive tentative claims in the DS text. Second, the HS students seemed particularly polarized in their conceptions of assertive claims used in the DN text, judged by institutional norm. Half of them disapproved of the repetitive assertions in the DN text but the rest of them agreed with the validity of such claims in the same text.

The first question explored how the HS and SS students’ conceptions of authorial stance are different from the concept of stance the experts operationalized in EAP/ESP research or instruction. Three major categories of conceptions emerged (see Table 2). The highest in the hierarchy and also the most frequent: Stance as linguistic construct, refers specifically to the language or rhetorical strategies used to present stance, therefore considered the most relevant. The next in the hierarchy, Stance as cognitive or behavioural entity, concerns how an author projects attitudes or encodes position. Though usually considered an integral part of constructing authorship (Martin and White, 2005), it is one rank lower because the participants approached it mostly from a cognitive or behavioural angle disconnected from language use. The third in the hierarchy, Stance as institutional norm, posits qualities required for conducting professional and scientific research sanctioned by the research community, so is considered least relevant. Compared to the EAP/ESP perspective of stance-taking in academic argument, the students’ conceptions seemed qualitatively different. Not only was a considerable amount of their discussion devoted to non-linguistic factors but even when they touched on language, their discussions were rather reductive and lacked substantiation.

Table 2.

Categories and Frequency of Conceptions.

Conceptions	Definitions	Frequency (%)
Stance as linguistic construct		46.88
(1) strengths of claims	concerns the projection of stance as polarized pair, e.g. weak and strong, certain and unsure	29.17%
(2) extent of precision	concerns ‘precise’ and unambiguous stance expressions	5.21%
(3) promoting research	concerns whether a stance emphasizes or contributes to the significance of the study	5.21%
(4) others		7.29%
Stance as cognitive or behavioural entity		22.91
(1) writer’s attitude	concerns the projection of polarized author attitude, e.g. humble and confidence, reserved and aggressive	15.62%
(2) position taken	concerns whether an author is subject, neutral or objective	7.29%
Stance as institutional norm		23.95
(1) professionalism	concerns whether an author is equipped with the ability to produce and deliver professional and scientific research	11.46%
(2) appropriateness	concerns whether a study is accurate/right and inaccurate/wrong	12.49%
Others	include no response and reported lack of awareness	6.26
TOTAL		100

The second question investigated which stance type, assertive or tentative, elicited more PCs or NCs. Of all the conceptions, PCs account for 41% and NCs account for 37.8%. Table 3 illustrates the distribution of both PCs and NCs excluding ‘No response’.⁷ The students generally reacted towards the propagation of tentative claims negatively. By contrast, assertions may undergird professionalism, and contribute to a sense of authoritativeness. Of the total PCs, 28.8% is attributed to assertive stance. By comparison, of the total NCs, tentative claims account for 25.6%. Specifically, a great proportion of the PCs, 17.7%, was attributed to Stance as linguistic construct; conversely, a great proportion of the NCs, 15.6%, was also attributed to Stance as linguistic construct.

Table 3.

Distribution of PCs and NCs of Assertive and Tentative Stance.

Conceptions	Percentage and rank²
	PCs	NCs
Stance as linguistic construct	Assertive: 17.7% (1)	Assertive: 6.7%(2)
Stance as institutional norm	Assertive: 7.8%(2)	Assertive: 4.4%(4)
Stance as cognitive or behavioural entity	Assertive: 3.3%(5)	Assertive: 1.1% (6)
Assertive total	28.8%	12.2%
Stance as linguistic construct	Tentative: 1.1% (6)	Tentative: 15.6% (1)
Stance as institutional norm	Tentative: 6.7%(3)	Tentative: 5.6%(3)
Stance as cognitive or behavioural entity	Tentative: 4.4%(4)	Tentative: 4.4%(4)
Tentative total	12.2%	25.6%
Total	41%	37.8%

Only the conceptions identified as either positive or negative are calculated by dividing them by the total conceptions (excluding ‘No response’).

Regarding the third question, some patterns of disciplinary difference in regulating conceptions were found. Specifically regarding the use of assertive stance to convey Stance as institutional norm in the DN text, salient disciplinary differences and opposing views emerged. First, relatively more HS students held positive conceptions here (3 HS students versus 1 SS student). Conversely, relatively more HS students held negative conceptions compared to their SS counterparts (3 HS students versus 0 SS students). Interestingly, opposite views existed here even among the group of the HS students. Finally, regarding Stance as linguistic construct, more SS students were negative about tentative stance in the DS text (4 SS students versus 2 HS students)

Below, intriguing patterns that emerged are discussed, which may shed some light on the importance of furthering this line of research.

Discussion and Pedagogical Implications

The study investigated a small group of 12 Mandarin-speaking EFL doctoral students’ conceptions of authorial stance in the context of academic writing. The results revealed three major conceptions of stance: in the order of relevance, Stance as linguistic construct (i.e. strengths of claims, extent of precision, and promoting research), Stance as cognitive or behavioural entity (i.e. writer’s attitude, and position taken), and Stance as institutional norm (i.e. professionalism, and appropriateness). Compared to the three dimensions of the concept of stance Wharton (2012) drew from existing research, epistemic (i.e. stances as to truth, certainty), attitudinal (i.e. feelings and value judgments), and dialogic (i.e. the extent to which authors acknowledge the possibility of alternative positions), quite salient qualitative differences were observed between these participants’ conceptions and the concepts of stance adopted by EAP/ESP researchers and practitioners.

Generally, these doctoral students were more versed in depicting stance in the epistemic (in particular, the paired meanings of certainty and doubt) and attitudinal sense, but were unable to discuss it in the dialogic vein. A closer look at the most relevant conception, Stance as linguistic construct, revealed that their conceptions were generally superficial and even imprecise. The students’ discussions were generally polarized and represented in epistemic terms, e.g. weak versus strong and uncertain versus certain. For example, Yu reiterated that stronger stance is more convincing and academic. The polarized judgments are italicized.

[Yu: HS]

The strong version is more convincing, which I appreciate more. This depends on who the readers are of course. The tentative version allows too much room to be refuted and some expressions are too uncertain by academic standards. Having conducted a study, the author should be assertive not uncertain.

Similarly, Leo also adopted a polarized view, regarding the strengths of stance. These terms are italicized.

[Leo: SS]

It makes more sense when the stance is stronger in the [domain specific] text. The tentative version is too uncertain, and the repeating occurrence gives me the feeling that the author is not sure what is being reported; instead, in the A version, the author is sure about what he or she is doing. So version A is more academic . . . In the [domain neutral] text, it is better to be tentative. Using hedges to weaken the argument is good. The assertive version is too blunt and arbitrary.

Next, the conception of Stance as cognitive or behavioural entity, ranked second in the hierarchy, generally concerns attitudes and positions authors take. First, they also interpreted attitudes quite reductively (e.g. ‘humble’ versus not humble, ‘confident’ versus not confident, or ‘reserved’ versus ‘aggressive’). Pei’s discussion marks a salient example. The attitudinal terms are italicized.

[Pei: SS]

Asians tend to write tentatively, which reflects a more humble attitude, informed by their cultures. I was told by my native speaking professor that I should be more confident so in my later drafts, I would become more confident . . . Tentative versions are more wordy. Confidence can lead to other studies but tentative stance suggests that it is difficult to carry on.

In addition, in discussing stance as positions an author may take, they approached more from a cognitive or behavioural than from a linguistic angle. For example, Kuey mentioned that a key aspect of tentative stance was to present a more objective argument.

[Kuey: HS]

The T version sounds cautious, reserved and so more objective; in the other version, some expressions are too strong, not common in academic argumentation. The [domain neutral] text is better with a stronger stance, which can support the claims better and emphasizes what needs to be done. A stronger stance can also help tune up the significance of the study and of the need for more actions in the future.

Taken together, of the three dimensions of stance drawn from previous research, epistemic, attitudinal and dialogic (Wharton, 2012), the first two seemed more intuitive for the students. The imprecise and narrower set of conceptions suggests a need to expand the students’ understanding related to more nuanced stance definitions and expressions (Dressen-Hammouda, 2014; Lancaster, 2014). To deploy stance effectively, plain description which states facts, presentation of dialogic alternatives, and accentuating viewpoints by contracting the room for negotiation are all required (Chang and Schleppegrell, 2011). Hyland (2004) demonstrated that authorial stance is a much deeper concept than the reductive polarity of strength. The construction of authorial stance involves extended context, and cannot be captured by an arbitrary set of lexical items or grammatical forms (Gray and Biber, 2012), which suggests that a semantic approach to the instruction of stance may better address the doctoral students’ needs. A semantic approach can inform how different voices can be manipulated to accomplish different rhetorical purposes. For example, an author can manage dialogic alternatives to entertain various scenarios of an issue and later contract the argumentative space to accentuate the viewpoints he or she hopes to endorse (Chang and Schleppegrell, 2011; Martin and White, 2005). In other words, both analysis at the micro level (identifying lexico-grammatical signals) and at the macro level (focusing on the meanings built up from clause to clause and paragraph to paragraph) may better inform the instruction of authorial stance, which can guide the learners to recognize how effective stance-taking results from the prosodic effect (Hood, 2006).

In addition to a lack of more in-depth conceptions of stance, these doctoral students were also drawn to assertive claims more than tentative claims. This converges with findings from a number of studies (e.g. Hyland and Milton, 1997; Lancaster, 2014; Wharton, 2012; Wu, 2007), which demonstrated a salient pattern of an appeal to assertions instead of tentativeness in students’ texts. Praise about assertive claims can generally be summarized as how it enhances certainty and authority, thus contributing to a more convincing argument. Conversely, repetitive tentative claims designate uncertainty and a lack of confidence, which can compromise the validity of the research. In sum, if a learner’s conception is vital to what is learned and what is not (e.g. Baxter Magolda, 2002; Schommer, 1994), NCs toward tentative stance may prevent the doctoral students from deploying a more effective and sophisticated stance.

Finally, disciplinary difference was also found to regulate the conceptions of the two student groups. While students from both disciplines shared the conceptions that assertive stance is more effective and appropriate, they held divergent views about the use of tentative stance. Of all the negative conceptions, a greatest proportion was devoted to the use of tentative stance in terms of the conception, Stance as linguistic construct. A salient divide was found between the SS and HS students. For the SS students, a researcher’s interpretive caliber is valued highly and expressing assertion is vital in embodying authority and delivering effective argument. Accordingly, the SS participants were dissatisfied with tentative or ‘weak’ language in academic argument. By contrast, for the HS students, it is less about a researcher’s interpretative caliber, hence language being less of an issue, than the extent of hard evidence or data available to determine the strength of their stance. Some of them even disputed the role language plays to ‘reify’ scientific investigation. To them certain tentative or assertive wordings are inherently ‘unscientific’. Generally, the SS students can be said to be more linguistically minded whereas their HS counterparts tended to downplay language but were drawn more to the cognitive or behavioural aspect of research. The phenomenon seems to be supported by Hyland (2005), who suggested that the humanities and social sciences students tend to be more explicit in positioning themselves than those in the hard sciences.

A second salient pattern of disciplinary difference was found related to the conception of Stance as institutional norm. First, while none of the SS students disputed the use of assertions in the DN text, a sociological study, which supports the discussion above that these students showed preference for assertions in interpreting research, the use of assertions actually elicited opposing views among the HS students, who were equally divided in their views here. Half of them considered assertions effective and acceptable when social issues are concerned to accentuate a stance. In this view, effective use of language is more likely to arouse action, aligned with the SS students’ conceptions that language and interpretation are inevitably important. However, the other half of the HS students disputed the use of assertions in any given context, which is unacceptable and not academic. Further evidence is needed to better capture how disciplinary assumptions may affect academic stance-taking.

This study has some limitations. First, the limited samples grounded in Taiwan prevent any firm conclusions from being drawn. While interesting patterns emerged, more samples need to be collected to understand the issue better. The limited scope of the study should not suggest that the challenges of academic writing concern EFL or L2 writers only. The challenge also remains true to writers for whom English is their first language (Hyland and Milton, 1997). Second, categorizing the participants into two large disciplines might not be nuanced enough as these students still represent different sub-disciplines which possess different assumptions of effective research writing. In the future, the participants recruited may be further divided into pure and applied disciplines (Hood, 2011), aside from the larger soft and hard disciplines, to report more nuanced findings regarding disciplinary differences.

Conclusion

The study sought to understand possible causes which give rise to the relative weakness of EFL doctoral students in presenting an effective authorial stance in research argument. While researchers of academic writing have emphasized the impact of presenting effective stance on writing performance (Hyland, 1998a; Schleppegrell, 2004; Wu, 2007; Zhao and Llosa, 2008), the doctoral students may actually be constrained by their limited understanding of authorial stance in writing, thus producing ineffective arguments. The study showed that the students lacked a more robust understanding regarding what authorial stance entails. And their conceptions of authorial stance seemed qualitatively different from the construct operationalized by EAP/ESP researchers and practitioners. They generally lacked the dialogic understanding of the stance construct, which involves tracking the development of contractive and expansive voices in extended context and creates prosody. They also believed that assertions can help craft a more convincing argument than tentative claims. These judgements were also regulated by disciplinary differences. In the future, an increase in sample size from different disciplines and cultural landscapes will certainly enhance our understanding of the issue.

Footnotes

Appendix A

Appendix B

Interview Protocol

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the National Science Council (NSC), Taiwan [grant number NSC 100-2410-H-003-165]. My gratitude also goes to Professor Tsai, Chin-Chung (National Taiwan University of Science and Technology) for his invaluable advice.

Notes

References

Aikenhead

Otsuji

(2000) Japanese and Canadian Science Teachers’ Views on Science and Culture. Journal of Science Teacher Education 11(4): 277–99.

Bakhtin

(1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Baxter Magolda

(2002) Epistemological reflection: the evolution of epistemological assumptions from age 18 to 30. In: Hofer

Pintrich

(eds) Personal Epistemology: The Psychology of Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 89–102.

Biber

(2006) Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5(2): 97–116.

Castello

Inesta

Monereo

(2009) Towards self-regulated academic writing: an exploratory study with graduate students in a situated learning environment. Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology 7(3): 1107–30.

Chang

Schleppegrell

(2011) Taking an effective authorial stance in academic writing: making the linguistic resources explicit for L2 writers in the social sciences. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10(3): 140–51.

Chang

Tsai

C-C

(2014) EFL doctoral students’ conceptions of authorial stance in academic knowledge claims and the tie to epistemic beliefs. Teaching in Higher Education 19(5): 525–42.

Dole

J A

Sinatra

(1994) Social psychology research on beliefs and attitudes: implications for research on learning from text. In: Garner

Alexander

(eds) Beliefs about Text and Instruction with Text. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 245–64.

Dressen-Hammouda

(2014) Measuring the voice of disciplinarity in scientific writing: a longitudinal exploration of experienced writers in geology. English for Specific Purposes 34(1): 14–25.

10.

Graber

(1987) Kind pictures and harsh words. In: Lehman-Scholzman

(ed.) Elections in America. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 115–41.

11.

Gray

Biber

(2012) Current conceptions of stance. In: Hyland

Sancho Guinda

(eds) Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 15–33.

12.

Holsti

(1969) Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

13.

Hood

(2006) The persuasive power of prosodies: radiating values in academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5(1): 37–49.

14.

Hood

(2011) Writing discipline: comparing inscriptions of knowledge and knowers in academic writing. In: Christie

Maton

(eds) Disciplinarity: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London and New York: Continuum, 106–28.

15.

Cao

(2011) Hedging and boosting in abstracts of applied linguistics articles: a comparative study of English- and Chinese-medium journals. Journal of Pragmatics 43(11): 2795–809.

16.

Hunston

Thompson

(2000) Evaluation: an introduction. In: Hunston

Thompson

(eds) Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–26.

17.

Hyland

Milton

(1997) Qualifications and certainty in L1 and L2 students’ writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 6(2): 183–205.

18.

Hyland

(1998a) Boosting, hedging and the negotiation of academic knowledge. Text 18(3): 349–82.

19.

Hyland

(1998b) Persuasion in academic articles. Perspectives 11(2): 73–103.

20.

Hyland

(2004) Disciplinary interactions: metadiscourse in L2 postgraduate writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 13(2): 133–51.

21.

Hyland

(2005) Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies 7(2): 173–92.

22.

Hyland

(2012) Undergraduate understandings: stance and voice in the final year reports. In Hyland

Sancho Guinda

(eds) Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 134–50.

23.

Lancaster

(2014) Exploring valued patterns of stance in upper-level student writing in the disciplines. Written Communication 31(1): 27–57.

24.

Leki

Cumming

Silva

(2006) Second-language composition teaching and learning. In: Smagorinsky

(ed.) Research on Composition: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change. New York and London: Teachers College Press, 141–69.

25.

Lonka

Joram

Bryson

(1996) Conceptions of learning and knowledge: does training make a Difference? Contemporary Educational Psychology 21(3): 240–60.

26.

Martin-Martin

Burgess

(2004) The rhetorical management of academic criticism in research article abstracts. Text 24(2): 171–95.

27.

Martin

White

PRR

(2005) The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

28.

Marton

Booth

(1997) Learning and Awareness. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

29.

Marton

(1981) Phenomenography – Describing conceptions of the world around us. Instructional Science 10(2): 177–200.

30.

Milagros del Saz Rubio

(2011) A pragmatic approach to the macro-structure and metadiscoursal features of research article introductions in the field of Agricultural Sciences. English for Specific Purposes 30(4): 258–71.

31.

Samraj

(2008) A discourse analysis of master’s theses across disciplines with a focus on introductions. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7(1): 55–67.

32.

Schleppegrell

(2004) Technical writing in a second language: the role of grammatical metaphor. In: Ravelli

Ellis

(eds) Analysing Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks. New York: Continuum, 173–89.

33.

Schommer

(1994) An emerging conceptualization of epistemological beliefs and their role in learning. In: Garner

Alexander

(eds) Beliefs about Text and Instruction with Text. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 25–40.

34.

Swales

(1990) Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. New York: Cambridge University Press.

35.

Swales

(2004) Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

36.

Tardy

(2012) Current conceptions of voice. In: Hyland

Sancho Guinda

(eds) Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 34–48.

37.

Thompson

(2001) A pedagogically-motivated corpus-based examination of PhD theses: macrostructure, citation practices and uses of modal verbs. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Reading, Reading.

38.

Thompson

(2012) Achieving a voice of authority in PhD theses. In: Hyland

Sancho Guinda

(eds) Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 119–33.

39.

Tsai

C.-C.

(2004) Conceptions of learning science among high school students in Taiwan: a phenomenographic analysis. International Journal of Science Education 26(14): 1733–50.

40.

Tsai

C.-C.

(2009) Conceptions of learning versus conceptions of web-based learning: the differences revealed by college students. Computers & Education 53(4): 1092–103.

41.

Vassileva

(2001) Commitment and detachment in English and Bulgarian academic writing. English for Specific Purposes 20(1): 83–102.

42.

Wharton

(2012) Epistemological and interpersonal stance in a data description task: findings from a discipline-specific learner corpus. English for Specific Purposes 31(give issue number): 261–70.

43.

(2007) The use of engagement resources in high- and low-rated undergraduate geography essays. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6(3): 254–71.

44.

Zhao

Llosa

(2008) Voice in high-stakes L1 academic writing assessment: implications for L2 writing instruction. Assessing Writing 13(3): 153–70.

45.

De Pew

Miller

(2005) Studying L2 writers’ digital writing: an argument for post-critical methods. Computers and Composition 22(3): 259–78.

46.

Miller

Greyling

Cooper

Sparks

Spector

(2000) Occupational stress and gender: a cross-cultural study. Stress Medicine 16(5): 271–78.

47.

Vikas

Wang

Passalacqua

Fox

(2011) Realizable high-order finite-volume schemes for quadrature-based moment methods. Journal of Computational Physics 230(13): 5328–52.