A Comparative Study of Stance and Engagement Used by English and Thai Speakers in English Argumentative Essays

Abstract

The present study investigates the similarities and differences of stance markers, engagement markers, 4-word stance bundles, and 4-word engagement bundles used in English argumentative texts of native speaker learners of English (NATIVE) and L1 Thai speakers (THAI) by the use of Antconc 3.4.3 (Anthony, 2014). The target items were retrieved from 229,607 words of NATIVE corpus that consisted of 321 essays in the LOCNESS corpus and 229,606 words of THAI corpus that consisted of 613 essays by Thai students in an international university in Thailand. In retrieval, the 4-word stance bundles and 4-word engagement bundles were filtered by frequency. This initial list was filtered again by applying a set of exclusion criteria. Then structural patterns of the generated 4-word stance bundles and 4-word engagement bundles were explored through concordance analysis by modified versions of Biber et al.’s (1999) structural framework and Hyland’s (2008a) functional taxonomy. This analyses revealed Thai learners used stance resources more often. For engagement markers, Thai learners significantly employed reader references and directives more often, whereas they significantly used questions,appeals to shared knowledge and personal asides less often. For the 4-word stance bundles, although the number of the stance bundles in NATIVE is lower than that in THAI, the variety of the stance bundles in THAI is lower. On the other hand, for 4- word engagement bundles, the use of the bundles was less varied than that in THAI due to the lower frequency. Regarding the structural patterns, the use in NATIVE and THAI corpora for 4-word stance bundles was quite similar with the first and second sequence. VP-based bundles got the biggest proportion, followed by others in both NATIVE and THAI corpora. However, differences occurred as the native speaker learners employed the NP-based bundles at the third order, and PP-based bundles were used the least, whereas Thai learners employed PP-based bundles more when compared to NP-bundles. The findings of the study, with regard to stance and engagement used in argumentative essays, could provide patterns and norms, which are expected in the argumentative essays, and which are useful to EFL learners.