APPRAISAL resources in L1 and L2 argumentative essays: A contrastive learner corpus-informed study of evaluative stance

Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory explores the ways interpersonal meanings are expressed when researching evaluative aspects of language use. Despite numerous discourse analyses using appraisal, there is little research comparing appraisal resources deployed by L1 and L2 English writers in discourse produced under the same conditions and on the same task. 60 argumentative essays across two writing prompts were collected from a larger corpus of Asian L2 English writing, to which the present study applied the appraisal model as part of a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1996, 2015)comparing the evaluative stance construed in L1 and L2 English texts. The findings show significant variation in the evaluative resources used in L1 and L2 essays. L1 English writers demonstrated a consistent reliance on engagement resources in general and showed a heavier dependence on these devices than L2 writers in their essays. In contrast, Hong Kong L2 English writers used a significantly higher frequency of negative attitude resources than L1 English writers. These contrastive corpus-informed results offer further evidence of differences in L1/L2 written evaluative stance that educators may take into account during writing instruction