Nominal stance construction in L1 and L2 students' writing

The study of stance and how academic writers convey an attitude to their material and readers has become an important area of teaching research in EAP in recent years (Hyland & Guinda, 2012). A relatively neglected means of stance expression, however, has been the Noun Complement structure. This study examines this structure as a nominal stance construction which is associated with students' advanced academic literacy. Through a corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis, this study compares the use of this stance construction in argumentative essays of 366 Chinese university students (L2) with those of 82 American students (L1) of similar age and educational level. Results show that the L2 students use significantly fewer instances of this construction especially in the event, discourse and cognition types of stance nouns, which are bound up with the generic conventions of argumentative essays. But they show a propensity to invest personal affect by pre-modifying the stance nouns with attitudinal adjectives and first-person possessives. The paper discusses a number of issues raised by the research and makes pedagogical suggestions for EAP writing instruction.