Abstract
Academic review writing is not merely about providing an overview but taking a stance and evaluating other scholars’ views in evaluation-loaded texts. In academic review genres, the authors describe, analyse, and evaluate the developments of a research. Perhaps the most noticeable way of such an evaluation in academic review genres is the use of attitudinal lexicon and its categories. The main aim of this research is (1) to investigate what type of attitude markers are frequently used to enhance evaluation in the review articles, and (2) to analyse their functions in the different analytical sections of the review articles. The data, drawn from a randomly selected corpus of thirty-two review articles, was analysed using Wordsmith tools (Scott, 2012) to investigate how evaluation was enhanced by the use of attitudinal lexicon. The results indicated that the attitude markers were more frequent in the Conclusion section than other analytical sections in the corpus. Four types of attitude markers were identified, however only two types (i.e. attitudinal adjectives and adverbs) were the most frequent markers. They appeared more frequently in Move2 and Move3 of the Conclusion sections. This study revealed how the authors professionally communicate with their readers to clarify their evaluation through attitude markers and express importance, limitations and gaps, compare and contrast, and praise and criticize the developments of a research in applied linguistics. The findings of this research can be drawn on in EAP courses for novice writers to facilitate their achievement in academic writing.
Highlights
Evaluation is one of the distinctive rhetorical strategies in academic writing
The analysis showed that attitude markers appeared in the four analytical sections with different frequency
The last analytical section was the Conclusion section
Summary
Evaluation is one of the distinctive rhetorical strategies in academic writing. It is noteworthy that authors strategically engage their immediate audience in their evaluation and use persuasive strategies in their academic discourses. Attitude markers are words (i.e. agree, surprisingly, significantly, only, important, issue, need) which assist writers to convey their evaluation, feeling, and attitude towards the discussion in the text. These markers inform the readers about the author’s point of view and his position in the text. In another definition, Hyland (2008) believes that stance can be referred to “the writer’s textual voice or community recognized personality” Move 2 was more frequently observed in the critical evaluative reviews than the bibliographic reviews
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