English as an academic lingua franca : a study of mainland Chinese master’s students’ stance-making in academic writing

Abstract

Stance refers to a writer’s values, beliefs, evaluations and personal feelings (Biber, 2006). It plays an essential role in negotiating acceptance or rejection of an argument and enables the writer to convince their readers to accept it (Hyland & Jiang, 2018). It is widely acknowledged that making a critical stance is crucial for successful academic writing. Hence, postgraduate students are usually asked to demonstrate their ability in making critical stances in written materials. However, the notions of stance and criticality are derived from the Western ideology of individualism (McKinley, 2015). For students who are not raised up or educated in the preferred background, especially oriental L2 learners, they might find both terms difficult to understand and to carry out. The current study adopted a sociocultural approach and focused on investigating how mainland Chinese master’s students would acculturate the academic writing conventions in an English-medium university with a particular focus on their stance-making and criticality-formation. Three key participants were identified as case studies in a master’s program of a soft discipline. The study traced the participants for more than two months and collected various kinds of data to present “thick description”. Results suggest that teachers’ strategic guidance on students’ thinking patterns would facilitate students’ critical stance-making in their academic writing. In the meantime, students would experience and embrace epistemological and identity shifts when they consciously practice and reflect on the teachers’ strategic guidance. Nevertheless, guidance on specific course content rather than academic writing per se did not show transformative effects on students. Corresponding teaching pedagogy was proposed and caution on imbalanced power relation embedded in the acculturation process was stressed for awareness.