Elsevier

English for Specific Purposes

Volume 46, April 2017, Pages 107-123
English for Specific Purposes

Writing with attitude: Stance expression in learner and professional dentistry research reports

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2017.02.001 Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We analysed stance features of dentistry research reports by novice undergraduate writers vs. those of professional writers.

  • Novice writers use a wide range of hedges, boosters, self-mention and attitude markers when writing, and use them frequently.

  • Professional writers generally use a smaller range of stance features than novice writers, and use them less frequently.

  • Teachers may consider raising awareness of these differences for English-in-the-discipline content.

Abstract

Medical students often lack key skills in academic writing, yet good academic writing is often a pre-requisite for employment, promotion and enculturation into the profession. This article focuses on the rhetorical strategies used for the presentation of academic stance by student writers of dentistry research reports. Adopting a contrastive, corpus-based approach, we compare student writing with that of comparable professionally-written research reports for evidence of hedging, boosting, self-mention and attitude markers. Our findings indicate that professional reports exhibit a narrower set of linguistic devices than used by student writers, who tend to use a much wider range of the four stance feature types analysed for discussion of both others' and their own personal stance, both across whole texts and by section. We discuss pedagogical implications for ESP professionals working to more closely align student writing with that of professional norms.

Introduction

Successful academic texts are built not simply on the writers' plausible representation of external reality, but perhaps more importantly on their projection of authorial stance toward the issues they discuss, while persuading disciplinary readers of the relevance and value of their research. The ability to achieve these rhetorical ends is now acknowledged to be both a key feature of writing in the discipline and an important aspect of academic literacy (Hyland, 1999, Lancaster, 2016). Thus a large number of studies have examined how stance is conveyed through different linguistic means (e.g. Charles, 2004), across disciplines and genres (e.g. Hyland & Guinda, 2012), between student and expert writers (e.g. Hyland & Tse, 2005), and even along historical periods (e.g. Hyland & Jiang, 2016). Although Gross and Chesley (2012) and Yang, Zheng, and Ge (2015) are among the few who have looked at the stance-making practice in medical prose, little attention has been given to medical research reports. Our focus in this paper is on the dentistry discipline, and how undergraduate students of dentistry grapple with this professional research genre.

This study aims to highlight, via a corpus-based approach, how both professional practitioners and undergraduate students of dentistry epistemologically and rhetorically demonstrate the findings of research projects in a written report format, and how the metadiscourse used for these functions highlights students' awareness of and engagement with disciplinary specificity of writing in dentistry. It is implied in this process that efforts spent on ‘learning to write’ in professional genres such as research reports are to entail the additional benefits of ‘writing to learn’, as students' adoption of rhetorical norms as part of the instruction and writing process enculturates them into professional practice. We begin by exploring how writers express epistemic and rhetorical values (namely the writer's presentation of stance) in their research reports, then describing how this process is shaped by disciplinary practice. We then outline the potential of the writing process for teaching and learning before presenting our contrastive analysis of stance features in learner and professional dentistry reports.

Section snippets

Stance in academic writing: evidentiality, attitude and presence

For students studying in medical fields, the vast majority of their time at university is spent training their technical skills so as to be able to perform complex procedures after graduation, both in terms of practical activities and extensive academic reading. However, one area of their university lives that students often neglect is their academic writing, with students from non-native English speaking backgrounds at English-as-a-medium-of-instruction universities facing particular

Enculturation into the profession – English in the (dentistry) discipline

The medical profession is one where universities and academia have a significant role to play in advancing medical knowledge via published works that are disseminated to professionals worldwide. As the world becomes more globalized, English becomes increasingly important as a tool for dentists to treat foreign patients and to communicate with peers, policy makers and other service providers within the discipline. Opportunities for promotion in the medical field are often tied to the number and

Rationale and scope of the present study

This research focuses on undergraduate students of dentistry at a university in Hong Kong. The writing centre of the university in question has devised an English course for dentistry students, with discipline specificity resting on the idea of ‘teaching the literacy skills which are appropriate to the purposes and understandings of particular communities’ (Hyland, 2002: 385). As the sole provider of dental education in Hong Kong and an English-medium university with a full inclusion of PBL in

A corpus-based approach to learner and professional stance analysis – Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis

This paper adopts a corpus-based approach to the analysis of stance in learner and professional texts. By ‘corpus’, we mean a collection of searchable, electronic texts that can be analysed for frequency, lexical and morphosyntactic features, and that can be annotated for the elements of stance under investigation. Notably, studies of academic corpora have sought to emphasize the importance of rhetorical practices in academic persuasion across a wide range of specific academic disciplines (e.g.

Cross-corpus comparison across whole texts

Table 3 shows the cross-corpora distribution of stance devices between the two corpora. To correct for multiple testing (avoiding ‘data dredging’/‘data fishing’, where multiple tests can lead to false significance, see Young & Karr, 2011), an alpha value of 0.0125 (for 4 tests) was used to ascertain the significance of the Mann–Whitney U comparison, with Holm–Bonferroni correction on the p values. As non-parametric statistics were performed, the median/absolute deviations are reported instead

Discussion

Our study aimed to see the extent to which student writers of research dentistry reports demonstrate evidence of enculturation into the profession in their writing, through a corpus-based comparison of stance features between learner and professionally-written texts. The focus of this discussion section includes how professional and learner writers manage the presentation of stance in their dentistry research reports, and the implications for pedagogy that arise from this comparison.

Regarding

Dr. Peter Crosthwaite is an assistant professor at the Centre for Applied English Studies (CAES), University of Hong Kong. He specialises in corpus-based analyses of learner language for the purposes of second language acquisition and pedagogy, as well as assessment of language proficiency and contrastive studies of Mandarin, Korean and English. He teaches SLA for taught masters students on the MA Applied Linguistics and MA TESOL, and is the co-ordinator of both of these programmes for HKU.

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    Dr. Peter Crosthwaite is an assistant professor at the Centre for Applied English Studies (CAES), University of Hong Kong. He specialises in corpus-based analyses of learner language for the purposes of second language acquisition and pedagogy, as well as assessment of language proficiency and contrastive studies of Mandarin, Korean and English. He teaches SLA for taught masters students on the MA Applied Linguistics and MA TESOL, and is the co-ordinator of both of these programmes for HKU.

    Dr. Lisa Cheung is a lecturer at CAES, and is the co-ordinator of the English-in-the-discipline course for Dentistry as well as the Centre's summer programs. She also specialises in corpus linguistics and data-driven learning.

    Dr. Feng (Kevin) Jiang is a former Ph.D. student at CAES, where this work was completed, yet one with an already impressive publication history in established journals. His work on stance nouns in academic writing (under the supervision of Prof. Ken Hyland) is outstanding and his papers and presentations have already been given numerous awards. He is now affiliated with the School of Foreign Language Education, Jilin University, China.

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