Abstract
Due to internationalization of education, students in the majority of leading Russian universities are increasingly likely to use English as a medium of instruction. At the same time, they are not offered preparatory courses in English academic writing. As a result, students are able to develop their academic writing skills mainly while undertaking content-based courses. Recent research indicates that one of the major concerns for novice writers is to be able to express their stance. The key aim of the study is to show that implementing some methods of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) into a content-based course might improve students’ ability to take a stance in their writing. The paper presents the analysis of 45 essays written in English by L2 novice writers during a teleconference course taught to a group of Russian and American students. The study employs a comparative linguistic analysis of some stance markers (pronoun ‘I’, reporting verbs, epistemic modal and evidential expressions) used in students’ essays written at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the course. The results suggest that the students’ ability to take a stance might be developed through the integration into the course of some elements of EAP teaching.
Highlights
Due to internationalization of education, students in the majority of leading Russian universities are increasingly likely to use English as a medium of instruction
The case study presented in this paper provides some ideas on how English academic writing skills might be developed through content-based courses
Special attention is paid to such authorial stance markers as pronoun ‘I’, reporting verbs and verbs of argumentation and epistemic modals, adverbs and adjectives used for hedging and boosting
Summary
Due to internationalization of education, students in the majority of leading Russian universities are increasingly likely to use English as a medium of instruction. The case study presented in this paper provides some ideas on how English academic writing skills might be developed through content-based courses These ideas are not new and are well developed in the Writing Across Curriculum approach (see Russell, Lea, Parker, Stree, & Donahue, 2009). The present paper discusses the results of a linguistic analysis of stance markers in Russian students’ essays written in English during a content-based course team-taught via teleconference to a group of American students from Connecticut College, USA and Russian students from the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia. Stance has been approached from a variety of perspectives Very broadly it can be defined as “the ways in which speakers and writers encode opinions and assessments in the language they produce” Special attention is paid to such authorial stance markers as pronoun ‘I’, reporting verbs and verbs of argumentation and epistemic modals, adverbs and adjectives used for hedging and boosting
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