A contrastive interlanguage analysis of the construction of evaluative stance in L1 and L2 essays

Abstract

Evaluative stance is constructed through the syntactic and lexical choices a writer makes to express the writer’s attitude, establish and maintain writer-reader relationships and organise discourse. The APPRAISAL theory (Martin & White, 2005) within Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is one of the approaches to explore the ways interpersonal meanings are expressed, and therefore is commonly applied when researching evaluative aspects of language use. Despite the large body of work done on APPRAISAL, there remains a paucity of research focusing on a range of APPRAISAL resources deployed by L1 English writers and Hong Kong L2 English writers. Based on a corpus of 60 academic argumentative essays, the present study applied the APPRAISAL systems to conduct a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1993; 1996) to compare and contrast the evaluative stance construed in L1 and L2 texts. The findings show significant differences in the use of evaluative resources between L1 and L2 essays in the two writing tasks. L1 English writers shifted from GRADUATION resources when discussing a positive topic to ENGAGEMENT resources when addressing a negative issue. In contrast, Hong Kong L2 English writers demonstrated a consistent and heavy reliance on resources of ATTITUDE in argumentative writing. The underuse of certain evaluative resources draws attention to the need for making the full range of these resources available for L2 learners. Future academic writing research is expected to take a contrastive corpus-based approach as well as a functional instead of a pragmatic perspective when corpus linguistics and SFL are more closely aligned.