Abstract
The study of stance and how academic writers convey an attitude to their material and readers has become an important area of teaching research in EAP in recent years (Hyland & Guinda, 2012). A relatively neglected means of stance expression, however, has been the Noun Complement structure. This study examines this structure as a nominal stance construction which is associated with students' advanced academic literacy. Through a corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis, this study compares the use of this stance construction in argumentative essays of 366 Chinese university students (L2) with those of 82 American students (L1) of similar age and educational level. Results show that the L2 students use significantly fewer instances of this construction especially in the event, discourse and cognition types of stance nouns, which are bound up with the generic conventions of argumentative essays. But they show a propensity to invest personal affect by pre-modifying the stance nouns with attitudinal adjectives and first-person possessives. The paper discusses a number of issues raised by the research and makes pedagogical suggestions for EAP writing instruction.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
