Reporting verb in research projects of EFL English major students

Abstract

Aim: The present study aimed to investigate 1) which reporting verbs are most frequently used by EFL English major students in their researcher projects, and 2) which group of reporting verbs does most of them use in the research projects.Method: In order to accomplish the purposes of the study, a corpus of 52 research projects written by EFL English major students was selected and investigated. Additionally, this study adopted the categorization of Francis, Huston, and Manning (1996) to classify reporting verbs.Findings: The findings showed that the top five high frequency reporting verbs were “show”, “find”, “present”, “analyse”, and “state”. After classifying the reporting verb groups, the findings also presented that the highest percentage of reporting verb groups of this study were the ARGUE verb group (50%) followed by THINK (18.75%), SHOW (12.5), FIND (12.5%), and ADD verb group (6.25%) respectively.Implications/Novel Contribution: This study intends to help to raise the writers’ awareness in choosing reporting evidential in research project or academic writing. Theoretically, it is a beginning to study what evidentially can do for the language users other than indicating the information source. It may lay a foundation for the future research and provide orientation for further studies. There are more areas to be further studied, for example, the functions of other evidential types, the genre convention, and evidential use in other genres.