Fostering Stance-Taking as a Sustainable Goal in Developing EFL Students’ Academic Writing Skills: Exploring the Effects of Explicit Instruction on Academic Writing Skills and Stance Deployment

Lu Zhang,Lawrence Jun Zhang

doi:10.3390/su13084270

Abstract

Effective stance-taking is considered as a crucial skill for successful academic writing and sustainable development of writing scholarship. However, student writers often encounter difficulties in this aspect. Scholars have thus called for explicit instruction to develop students’ academic writing ability as a sustainable goal. Learning stance-taking is a particularly relevant area of intensive interest among writing scholars. Yet, few empirical studies have been conducted to examine its effectiveness on students’ academic writing quality and stance deployment. To fill this gap, a quasi-experimental research was conducted with 46 undergraduate students in a Chinese university, who were randomly assigned to two conditions: a treatment group and a comparison group. The treatment group received an eight-week explicit stance instruction, while the comparison group received curriculum-based writing instruction at the same time. Academic texts were collected both prior to and after the period of intervention. Results revealed that the treatment group outperformed the comparison group in the post-test in terms of academic writing quality and stance performance. Their writing also exhibited changes in the frequencies of an array of stance types deployed (e.g., proclaim: pronounce, proclaim: endorse, entertain, attribute), indicating their enhanced understanding of stance and improved competence of mitigation and integrating external voices for better academic writing. Implications for writing instruction are discussed.

Highlights

Published: 12 April 2021Authorial stance is defined as the way that a writer conveys personal evaluations toward the subject matter under discussion and this phenomenon has received increasing research attention [1,2,3,4]
Extensive research has shown that skilled academic writers are able to strategically present authorial stance that contributes to critical evaluation, reader solidarity, and persuasive argumentation [5,6,7,8,9,10]
The current study investigated the effects of explicit stance instruction, framed within the Engagement system from a theoretical perspective of dialogism, on students’ stance deployment and academic writing quality in an EFL context at the tertiary level

Summary

Introduction

Published: 12 April 2021Authorial stance is defined as the way that a writer conveys personal evaluations toward the subject matter under discussion and this phenomenon has received increasing research attention [1,2,3,4]. Extensive research has shown that skilled academic writers are able to strategically present authorial stance that contributes to critical evaluation, reader solidarity, and persuasive argumentation [5,6,7,8,9,10]. Student writing is frequently found to be single-voiced, with strong commitments, authorial detachment, or without acknowledging alternative views [3,9,13,15,16]. These features are regarded as less strategic in interpersonal positioning and dialogic alignment with readers to the detriment of writing quality [17]

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion