Stance-taking: hedging and the writer-reader relationship in EAL and EL1 research

© 2014 Dr. Maizura Mohd NoorStance can be understood to encompass a writer’s standpoint or opinion in relation to a topic, setting and an audience. Generally in studies into academic writing, English as an additional language (EAL) scholars have been found to express their opinions differently to English as first language (EL1) scholars. For example, Malaysian scholars tend to avoid criticizing or evaluating previously published research by other writers as compared to their EL1 counterparts. Not only has research in this field been under theorized, but the methodological approach of many previous investigations has been operationalized through the use of software programs that employ predetermined lists of items to analyse data from large corpora. However, such an approach fails to account for the role played by context in stance-taking, produces findings limited to the identification of single lexical items, and limits the possibility of discovering new items. Questions relating to stance-taking and the identification of these practices lie at the core of the present study. In this thesis, I investigate two of the numerous linguistic and interactional features of stance: hedging and the writer-reader relationship. This study aims to extend our understanding of these aspects of academic writing by analyzing and comparing the stance-taking practices of EAL scholars from Malaysia with those of EL1 scholars, from the specific fields of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. The methodological framework of the study adopts a broader, context-based approach to the identification and analysis of these aspects of stance compared with many previous studies. The corpus consists of twenty single-authored research articles (ten by EL1 and ten by EAL scholars) published in Scopus-indexed journals. The study also includes interview data based on an EAL Malaysian researcher’s retrospective account of her motives for the various rhetorical strategies she used in her writing and the parallel comments of two readers regarding their take up of these strategies. Findings revealed similar patterns of hedging and management of writer-reader relationship by the EAL and EL1 writers, although differences were found in terms of the limited range of options, as well as specific avoidance of certain items, in the writing of EAL scholars. Findings from the pre-interview questionnaire and interview data showed the EAL reader to have stronger metapragmatic awareness compared to the EL1 reader. Occasionally, the EAL writer’s intentions were misinterpreted by the readers, especially the EL1 reader. The findings based on this cross-cultural comparative study of stance-taking contribute to our understanding of the ways in which Linguistics and Applied Linguistics scholars from different linguistic backgrounds express propositional commitment in their published academic papers. Most importantly, differences found in terms of range as well as preferences have been treated as distinctive intelligible forms, rather than instances of non-conformist and unacceptable versions of ‘standard’ academic English