Disciplinary enculturation and authorial stance
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Keywords

authorial stance
postgraduate students
thesis and dissertation
corpus
posicionamiento del autor
alumnos de posgrado
tesis y disertaciones

How to Cite

Qiu, X., & Ma, X. (2019). Disciplinary enculturation and authorial stance: Comparison of stance features among master’s dissertations, doctoral theses, and research articles . Ibérica, (38), 327–348. Retrieved from https://www.revistaiberica.org/index.php/iberica/article/view/103

Abstract

Achieving a credible and authoritative stance in academic writing requires a writer’s disciplinary enculturation. While postgraduate students may have a foot in the door, expert writers have accumulated much knowledge and practice in their research fields. However, we do not yet know enough about how writers with different degrees of disciplinary enculturation produce an authorial stance in specific writing contexts. To address this gap, this study explores the use of stance features in master’s dissertations, doctoral theses, and published research articles in applied linguistics. Findings show that master’s students employed more hedges, boosters, and attitude markers, but fewer self-mentions than doctoral and expert writers, suggesting they were tentative in making propositions and respectful of claims in their disciplinary community. Doctoral candidates adopted similar stance expression practices as expert writers, indicating their emergent mastery of their field’s rhetorical conventions. The findings contribute to understandings of writers’ differences in taking authorial stance with respect to disciplinary enculturation, and suggest ways to enhance postgraduate students’ stance-taking practices in academic writing
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Copyright (c) 2019 Xuyan Qiu, Xiaohao Ma

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