Stance expressions in academic writing : A corpus-based comparison of Chinese students’ MA dissertations and PhD theses

One of the approaches to exploring the interactional and persuasive nature of academic writing is through the use of stance features in texts. Adopting a corpus-based analysis, this study compared how MA and PhD applied linguistics dissertations/theses in the Chinese mainland differed in terms of stance making in their texts. Two corpora were built for the study, an MA dissertation corpus and a PhD thesis corpus. The MA dissertations and PhD theses in each case were written by the same writers. The use of stance markers was examined using Hyland's framework for analysis. It was found that compared to their MA dissertations, student writers with doctoral training demonstrated some progress in stance making in their PhD theses. They employed fewer boosters, mastered a wider set of attitude markers, and displayed an increased ability to assert positions and involve readers in their texts. These findings reveal a developmental progression in the use of stance for these students which can hopefully inform academic writing training at the graduate level for Chinese students writing in English.