Abstract
Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory explores the ways interpersonal meanings are expressed when researching evaluative aspects of language use. Despite numerous discourse analyses using appraisal, there is little research comparing appraisal resources deployed by L1 and L2 English writers in discourse produced under the same conditions and on the same task. 60 argumentative essays across two writing prompts were collected from a larger corpus of Asian L2 English writing, to which the present study applied the appraisal model as part of a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1996, 2015)comparing the evaluative stance construed in L1 and L2 English texts. The findings show significant variation in the evaluative resources used in L1 and L2 essays. L1 English writers demonstrated a consistent reliance on engagement resources in general and showed a heavier dependence on these devices than L2 writers in their essays. In contrast, Hong Kong L2 English writers used a significantly higher frequency of negative attitude resources than L1 English writers. These contrastive corpus-informed results offer further evidence of differences in L1/L2 written evaluative stance that educators may take into account during writing instruction.
Highlights
Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory explores the ways interpersonal meanings are expressed when researching evaluative aspects of language use
These studies have compared published research writing with L2 essays (Hood) or L1 writing from two different languages (Geng and Wharton), and there is still a need to conduct a study comparing L1 and L2 English writing produced under the same conditions on the same task(s) — a gap this paper intends to fill
To determine whether language proficiency (L1 native / L2 intermediate), task type or the interaction of both factors was responsible for the variance found across three main appraisal resources in the corpus, the normalised frequencies of these resources were first converted into standardized z-scores to ensure a normal distribution, before MANOVA was performed
Summary
Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory explores the ways interpersonal meanings are expressed when researching evaluative aspects of language use. Corpus researchers (e.g., Flowerdew, 1998; Granger, 2002, 2004; Sinclair, 2004) have long advocated the incorporation of corpus linguistic techniques to accompany the methods of analysing discourse, and research of this nature is beginning to enter the literature, such as Hood (2005) and, most recently, Geng and Wharton (2016) These studies have compared published research writing with L2 essays (Hood) or L1 writing from two different languages (Geng and Wharton), and there is still a need to conduct a study comparing L1 and L2 English writing produced under the same conditions on the same task(s) — a gap this paper intends to fill. This paper first outlines the appraisal framework for the reader, before discussing a corpus-informed approach to the analysis of evaluation under this framework
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