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Authorial Identity Among Iranian vs. English Native Speakers: A Corpus- based Analysis of Stance and Engagement Markers in Research Articles

Seyri, Haniye | 2019

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: English
  3. Document No: 52206 (31)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Languages and Linguistics Center
  6. Advisor(s): Rezaei, Saeed
  7. Abstract:
  8. Academic writing, being an essential part of today's academic milieu, is not mere production of different texts but is also inextricably intertwined with issues related to authorial presence and interaction. Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this study investigated how various factors namely, disciplinary conventions, writers' culture, and types of journals in which authors publish could exert influence on the use of stance and engagement markers (Hyland, 2005a) in the genre of research articles. The main corpus of this study consisted of three different sub-corpora including locally oriented corpus, internationally oriented corpus, and Native English-Speaking corpus in each of which there were 60 research articles drawn from soft and hard sciences with the former including Applied Linguistics, Sociology, Economics, and the latter including Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Biology. In order to examine the frequency of stance and engagement markers in the three sub-corpora separately, MAXQDA 2018 was used. Moreover, using SPSS, several Chi-square tests were run to investigate whether the differences found in the frequencies were significant or not. The results of the present study demonstrated that writers of different fields of study from different L1 backgrounds, publishing in international and local journals, exerted varying degrees of authorship and interaction in their texts. Regarding the disciplinary variation, it was observed that researchers in soft disciplines used more stance and engagement markers than the ones in hard disciplines. With regards to cross-cultural variation, it was revealed that native academic writers preferred to draw more on interactional markers than their counterpart non-native academic writers. Finally, it was observed that research articles published in international journals enjoyed higher frequencies of stance and engagement markers than research articles published in local journals. As regards the pedagogical implications of the study, it is worth mentioning that this study contributes to academic writers' awareness raising of their own presence in texts and interaction with readers based on the usage of stance and engagement markers. By making students and academics cognizant of these linguistic devices, we not only improve their understanding of disciplinary, cultural, and contextual conventions but also prepare them for projecting their own arguments in their community of practice. In addition, there are some suggestions for activities regarding consciousness raising of academicians at the end of this thesis. The findings can also be utilized to teach academic writing strategies to Iranian academic writers who mainly aim at publishing in prestigious international journals
  9. Keywords:
  10. Academic Writing ; Engagement Markers ; Stance Markers ; Corpus Based Approach

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