A diachronic study of authorial stance in the discussion of Chinese MA theses and published research articles

Abstract

Stance-taking in academic writing changes over time in response to individual options and shifting disciplinary, social and cultural practices. The existing literature on stance primarily adopts a synchronic perspective and diachronic studies are scarce. To add to the thin body of literature, this study investigates the changing patterns of authorial stance in the part of discussion of Chinese MA theses and published research articles (RA) over the past 30 years in the discipline of applied linguistics. Two corpora, one consisting of 90 thesis discussions written in English by Chinese MA students from 1991 to 2020, and the other comprising 90 RA discussions from three leading journals in the field from the same time period, were built and retrieved for four major stance resources, namely, hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions according to Hyland's (2005b) stance model. Results reveal that Chinese students consistently used fewer stance markers than RA writers across the three decades. The two groups of writers' employment of the four stance resources also displayed distinct changing patterns over the years. The study also unveils problematic demonstration of authorial stance by Chinese students, thus emphasizing the need for explicit instruction on stance-taking in L2 English academic writing.