A Corpus-Based Contrastive Analysis of Stance Strategies in Native and Nonnative Speakers’ English Academic Writings: Introduction and Discussion Sections in Focus

The present study was an attempt to illustrate the interaction between writers and readers. Conveying of the writers’voice, stance, and interaction with reader was put forward within this paradigm. Being a good academic writer ishighly related to the use of these strategies. Adopting a position and persuading readers of claims are very important.This study was aimed at showing the differences between Iranian and American M.A. EFL writers in using stancestrategies (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions) in Introduction and Discussion sections of academicpapers. The corpora for this study were 40 articles (20 for American native and 20 for Iranian nonnative writers) fromdifferent journals such as Journal of Research Studies in Education, English language Teaching, System, TESOLQuarterly, and ELT. The significance and frequency of items were calculated using SPSS software version 22. Suchstatistical tools as frequency, percentage, and Chi-square were utilized to analyze the collected data. The findingsshowed that there was no statistically significant difference between native and nonnative writers in using stancestrategies although native writers tended to use hedges, attitude markers, and self-mentions comparatively more thannonnatives, whereas nonnative writers used a greater number of boosters.

Keywords:

attitude markers , boosters , hedges , self-mentions , stance strategies , native vs. nonnative writers