CC BY-ND
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Journal of Language & Education
Volume 1, Issue 4, 2015
The development of stance-taking strategies in L2 students’ academic essays: the case of a content-based Russian-American teleconference course
Irina Shchemeleva
National Research University Higher School of Economics
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.
Keywords: authorial stance, English L2 essays, academic writing, teleconference
Introduction
Today one of the top priorities of many universities all around the world has become the internationalization of education. Russia is not an exception here: students in the leading Russian universities are more and more exposed to English. Though it is not the main medium of instruction, some courses or even educational programmes are offered in English. At the same time, students taking such courses are very often not
Irina Shchemeleva is Associate Professor of English and head of the Department of Foreign Languages at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia. Her field of specialization is English as a Lingua Franca in academic settings (ELFA) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). She has publications on such topics as contrastive rhetoric, L1/L2 academic writing, and collaborative teaching via teleconference.
E-mail: ishemeliova@hse.ru
given any special training or assistance in English academic writing. In such a context they have to learn how to write in the process of writing.
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). However, this approach is usually applied in English medium universities, unlike a university where the medium of instruction is Russian which is the research site of this study.
As is known, one of the most important characteristics of English written academic genres at university is the student’s ability to express their views in academic argumentation. Writing an academic essay involves the process of taking a certain stance on a given topic or issue and supporting this stance. The present paper discusses the results of a linguistic analysis of
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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.
In linguistics, 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” (Gray & Biber, 2012, p. 15). Thus, it may cover different linguistic means. The present analysis will concentrate on those stance markers that present authorial position with respect to knowledge. 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.
It will be suggested that the ability to express writer’s stance and hence, to construct supportive arguments in essays might be developed through the integration into the course of some elements of EAP teaching, such as explanation of some norms of Anglo-American academic discourse, analysis of essays written by English speaking classmates who had been previously taught how to write academic essays, and evaluation of discussion board posting.
Expressing authorial stance in academic texts
The concepts of stance and voice in academic writing have been studied from an array of linguistic viewpoints. Researchers use different terms, such as evi-dentiality, affect, hedging, evaluation, appraisal, voice and stance (see Guinda & Hyland, 2012). In this paper authorial stance is understood as “personal feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or assessments” (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999, p. 966).
Identifying linguistic features associated with stance and voice has been also controversial (Petrie, 2010). Some studies consider the use of the 1st person singular pronoun, transitivity, hedges, modality and lexical choices as linguistic markers of stance and voice (Ivanic & Camps, 2001), others include self-mentions, hedges, boosters and attitudinal markers (Hyland, 2002, 2005); still others analyze various grammatical means such as stance adverbials, complement clauses, modals and semi-modals, etc. (Biber et al., 1999). Despite this difference in approaches, there seems to be an agreement that stance structures with a 1st person subject “are the most overt expressions of speaker/au-thorial stance” (Biber, 2006, p. 90). But besides presenting oneself through the use of 1st person pronouns, appropriate authorial stance is rhetorically construct-
ed through such means as “tuning up or down one’s commitment to assertions, acknowledging alternative perspectives, responding to anticipated counterarguments, endorsing or distancing oneself from others’ views” (Lancaster, 2011). Therefore, the analysis includes reporting verbs and verbs of argumentation used to introduce sources of information and epistemic modal verbs, adverbs and adjectives used as ‘hedges’ — i.e., devices which withhold complete commitment to a proposition, allowing information to be presented as an opinion rather than fact (Hyland, 1998) and ‘boosters,’ — i.e., devices that allow writers to express their certainty in their claims (Hyland, 2005).
Studies in contrastive rhetoric have found that the ways authors present themselves in academic texts are culture-specific (Flottum, 2009; Shchemeleva, 2015). That is especially true for the cultures displaying a strong national writing tradition. A few studies of the texts written by Russian authors in English indicate the general tendency of Russian authors to construct academic texts according to the rules of national (Russian) academic discourse (Yakhontova, 2002; Bain Butler, Trosclair, Zhou, & Wei, 2014). To better understand the context of the present study, a brief overview of the situation with teaching academic writing in Russia will be given in the next section.
Developing writing skills at university level in Russia
In the Soviet Russia, as well as in many other countries in Eastern Europe writing competence was not regarded as a key one and was not treated as a goal in teaching/learning (Harbord, 2010). Until very recently writing was rarely used in knowledge assessment at a university level. A key genre traditionally produced by university students was lecture note-taking or literature review notes. Written papers (often referred to as ‘reports’) aimed primarily at measuring how much a student had read in a subject and were limited to a summary ofliterature.
Though there has not been much research in the development of writing skills in the present day Russian universities, some studies show that very little has changed since the Soviet time. Although recently in higher education there has been a shift from the culture of oral assessment to the written exams, there has been no systematic teaching of writing. A small-scale research carried out in one of the Russian universities showed that the majority of genres Russian students are exposed to both at school and at university are ‘reproductive’ ones requiring students to write on a certain topic summarizing the content of different sources without analyzing, arguing or making their own judgments (e.g. ‘referat’, i.e. a written report on the subject,
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF STANCE-TAKING STRATEGIES IN L2 STUDENTS’ACADEMIC ESSAYS
which ended up as a rendering of the previously read text, etc.) (Shchemeleva & Smirnova, 2014).
Owing to such state of affairs, Russian students’ abilities to take a stance and construct supported arguments are underdeveloped. “My students can’t argue” is a recurrent complaint of many university professors in Russia. It might be inferred that if students experience difficulties with producing argumentative texts in LI, they will be very likely to have a lot of challenges in writing academic texts in educational contexts when English becomes the language of instruction and assessment is mediated through the academic essay.
Case study: The Net Generation course
In the fall of 2014, a teleconference course “The Net Generation: Russian and American Youth Cultures” that was aimed to develop language and cultural competence in Russian and American students was team-taught in real time. It included 17 Russian and 18 American students. It was the second course taught together with American partners; the first experimental one was launched in fall 2011 (for the course description see Lanoux, 2013). The idea was to teach a course on a topic of mutual interest to Russian and American students, and to give all of our students an opportunity to serve as native informants for their peers abroad. For this reason, youth culture was chosen as the course focus.
In the course of four months, students completed readings, viewed films, and contributed to an online discussion board before each class; they were also required to write three short essays, to complete a project, and to participate actively in class discussions. There were two meetings a week: the first was held via teleconference; for the second class, Russian and American students met separately at their home institutions.
“The Net Generation” was not a language course. It was based on the ideas of the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum movement that stresses the importance of functional communication above grammatical accuracy. So, the students were encouraged to express their opinion and participate in all kinds of discussions. Language inaccuracies did not affect their grade as long as the meaning remained clear. The course contained a substantial writing component: discussion board posts and essays.
Interventions carried out to improve essay writing skills during the course
A number of teaching interventions were integrated into the essay writing course to enhance students’
writing development. These interventions focused on analyses of essays, reading essays written by peers and analyses of discussion board posts. Essay topics addressed such controversial issues as academic integrity, the cost of higher education, essentialist and non-essentialists notions of gender, etc. that demanded a clear positioning from students. Sometimes the above requirement was indicated in the assignment like below:
Assignment 1: The point of this essay is to describe, analyze, and interpret the material we have discussed in class, and to make an argument that clearly articulates your views on the subject.
The development of writing skills was not among the main goals of the course, but since Russian participants were neither familiar with the genre of English academic essay, nor trained in EAP, it was predicted that they would need some assistance in writing their texts. Therefore, before the first essay was written, the Russian students had been given explanations of some rules of the academic essay genre. After the essays had been submitted, it was decided not to grade them as there was a huge difference in the quality of writing between the two groups of the students. The difference was not between English LI and L2 speakers, rather, it was between more experienced writers, i.e. those students who had been acquainted with the genre - mostly, American students, and novice writers, i.e. those for whom it was the first experience in writing an essay in English.
The essays were posted (unattributed and with students’ permission) to the course Moodle site in order to give students an opportunity to compare how their peers abroad responded to the same set of questions. In fact, the students were asked to read all 32 essays. Then there was a short class discussion with Russian students devoted to essay writing. The students were asked two questions: (1) if they were able to identify essays written by Russian students and by American students; and (2) in what way (if any) the essays were different? Russian students had no difficulty telling which essays were written by American classmates, but besides the obvious fact that ‘their English is much better’, the following things were mentioned:
- theyusethesources;
- they express their opinion and base the arguments
on some evidence;
- in many cases they generalize (not only write about
their own experience).
In fact, these were the main differences in the 2 groups of essays: Russian students very often tended to ignore other sources of information, express their claims without giving sufficient evidence and write about their own experience.
There was a similar ‘analytical session’ after the second essay had been written in which Russian stu-
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IRINA SHCHEMELEVA
dents read excepts from each others’ essays and analyzed some paragraphs from American peers’ essays. During those class discussions and in individual tutorials students’ attention was drawn to some characteristics of essay writing (structure, coherence, argumentation, reference to sources, etc.)
In classes Discussion Board posts were also regularly referred to. The students were encouraged not only to analyze what American students write, but also how they do it: how they express their opinion, how they develop the argument, provide evidence.
Formal essays and posts on a discussion board are two quite different genres as the former maintains a strong status hierarchy between an instructor and a student, while the latter is a semi-formal discussion initiated in the majority of cases by the instructor and sometimes - by students (Chandrasegaran, 2008). Still, both genres imply taking a certain stance on a given topic. The hypothesis was that analysis of discussion board posts might facilitate students’ abilities of stancetaking.
Methodology
The study employed both qualitative and quantitative approaches including frequency counts and discourse analysis of 45 essays written by Russian students. The corpus was subdivided into 3 sub-corpora: essay 1 (written at the beginning of the course), essay 2 (written in the middle) and essay 3 (written at the end). Each sub-corpus contained 15 essays, to compare and contrast the way the students used stance markers. The total word count is 38 751, with the average number of words per essay 918, 858 and 807, respectively. In conducting quantitative analysis, the corpus was searched for 1st person singular pronouns, reporting verbs, verbs of argumentation, epistemic modal verbs, adverbs and adjectives using AntConc 3.2.4w, a text analysis and concordance tool. After that, all instances of usage were examined in context in order to determine their pragmatic and rhetoric functions. At the final stage, the frequencies and functions of analyzed stance markers in essay 1, 2 and 3 were compared.
Analysis of stance markers
Pragmatic functions of 1st person singular pronouns
The total counts of 1st person singular pronoun ‘I’ and its associated forms (‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’) give us some general idea of how the students present themselves in the text. As can be seen from Table 1, the pro-
nouns are quite often used, so it might seem that the students clearly express their stance in writing.
The frequency counts show that there is a decline in the number of 1st person singular pronouns from Essay 1 to Essay 3. To explain the reason of the reduction in frequency, we need to look at pragmatic functions of pronouns in the texts.
For the present study, the terminology of Flottum (2009) who identified the cases when the author acts as a writer, an arguer, a researcher, and an evaluator is used. This classification has been successfully applied to the analyses of 1st person pronouns used in research articles (Flottum, 2009; Shchemeleva, 2015). However, when used in the analysis of novice students’ writing, these four categories could not cover all the cases of the 1st person singular pronoun usage. A number of cases have been found when the pronoun was used to refer to some personal experience of the writer:
(1) I’ve never encountered a problem of domestic violence and I do not even have examples of such accidents among my friends.
(2) Personally, I experienced not being able to continue a conversation with my friend from the Internet in the real life.
or to refer to knowledge (or the lack of knowledge) of the writer:
(3) I know that in some Russian universities, even teacher sees that student are cheating, he say nothing.
(4) Obviously, I do not know so much about the parents of CC students.
The identified categories are not watertight, and there are cases that might have different interpretations. The distribution of functions is presented in Table 2.
As can be seen, there has not been identified a single case when the writer is in the role of a researcher. A possible explanation to that might be that students do not consider writing an essay an activity implying research.
Another feature that should be mentioned is a rather big number of cases when students referred to their personal experience or their knowledge. Sometimes their essays looked more like fiction than academic writing. Students’ attention was drawn to the fact that American peers tended to avoid such expressions as Obviously I do not know so much about; I cannot remember such remarkable events; I have never thought about it; etc. Nevertheless, it did not seem to have any results as the number of cases with reference to personal experience reduced by almost 5% in essay 2 (after the explanation), but then raised again making the difference between the first and third essays only 2.5%.
One more feature that distinguishes Russian students’ essays is a high number of cases when the students acted as arguers. In essay 1 they comprise more than half of all cases. Moreover, very often arguments are quite strong:
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF STANCE-TAKING STRATEGIES IN L2 STUDENTS’ACADEMIC ESSAYS
Table 1
Distribution oflst person singular pronouns
I Me/my/mine Total number Per 1 essay
Essay 1 170 43 213 14.2
Essay 2 144 48 192 12.8
Essay3 116 45 161 10.7
Table 2 Functions oflst person pronouns
Essay 1 Essay 2 Essay 3
О/ О/ О/ /0/0/0
Arguer 110 51.6 85 44.3 63 39.1
Writer 44 20.7 49 25.5 40 24.8
Personal experience 40 18.8 27 14.1 26 16.2
Reference to knowledge (lack of knowledge) 10 4.7 23 12.0 17 10.6
Evaluation 9 4.2 8 4.1 15 9.3
Total 213 192 161
(5) I absolutely agree with his point of view.
(6) I do believe that the name of generation really matters because...
(7) I strongly believe that it is immoral to raise children in such marriages.
Though such statements might be appropriate for academic texts, the problem is that very often the claims were neither supported by evidence nor referred to course readings or other sources.
One of the possible explanations for the overall reduction in frequency of 1st person singular pronouns might be that as soon as the students realized that all their claims should be based on some sources of information (not only on their personal experience and their knowledge), they started to make fewer claims, but these claims were supported by sources. To test this hypothesis, let us turn to the analysis of evidential markers, in particular, to verbs and expressions used to introduce sources of information.
Verbs and expressions introducing sources of knowledge
The importance to interpret and evaluate cited work in academic writing is universally acknowledged. The research on novice L2 writers’ practices shows that for them learning to cite and evaluate previous literature appropriately is particularly challenging due to the complexity of skillful stance manipulation (for the
review of the research on the topic see Sawaki, 2014). It has been found that L2 writers overuse quotation with no evaluation and rely on a restricted range of verbs, such as ‘say’ to introduce these quotes (Hyland, 2002, p. 116). Luzon in her analysis of the citation practices, names, among others, the following characteristics of L2 students’ writing: excessive quotation, scarcity of summaries and paraphrases, patchwriting, limited range of reporting verbs, lack of evaluation (Luzon, 2015). The results of the analysis of reporting verbs and expressions used to acknowledge sources in Russian students’ essays are consistent with these findings.
The comparison of different linguistic means used to mark the source of knowledge in essay 1 and 3 is presented in Table 3. The data show that even in essay 1 on average each student referred to 2.5 sources, which might seem appropriate, taking into consideration that the essays were short. In the majority of cases, though, the references are either parenthetical (examples (8), (9)) or without any interpretation or analysis of the sources (examples (10), (11)):
(8) The youth from countries where the process of globalization takes place (such as the USA and Russia) can share the same significant events, developments and go through the same experience [2].
(9) The consequence of this is a wide spread of single parent families. “Single people live alone and proudly consider themselves families of one — more generous and civic-minded than so-called “greedy marrieds”[l].
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IRINA SHCHEMELEVA
Table 3
Marking the source of knowledge
Essay 1 Essay 3
Total number of references 37 (2.5 per essay) 46 (3.1 per essay)
Not introduced 13 (35%) 10(21.7%)
Most common verbs and expressions Say (4) According to (4) Mention (2) Describe (3) The definition was given by (2) Write (2) What I learnt from (6) According to (5) Write (3) Show (3) Support (2) Describe (2)
Other verbs and expressions Call Represent Raise an issue The statement of sb. The answer was given... The quote given in... The opinion of... The definition was given by... Demonstrate Blame Suppose Declare Reading sb’s work I learnt... The definition belongs to ... A definition from From ...we can understand As I understood from ... Mean Express Analyze Believe As it was discussed in...
Number of different verbs and expressions 14 20
(10) In his works he says that we are the one who are responsible for our position in social structure
(11) In the article “The changing American family” it is written that the nation birthrate is half what it was in I960...
The numbers in brackets in examples (8) and (9) point to the number of the source in the reference list. The analysis reveals that in essay 1 the sources are not introduced in 35% of cases. In 40% of cases the students use verbs that have no evaluative meaning (say, write, call, mention, etc.), simply demonstrating that they are familiar with the sources.
The data shows that the total number of references slightly increased from essay 1 to essay 3, while the number of sources that were not introduced decreased from 35% to 21.7%. In essay 3 the students not only built their arguments on class readings and other sources more often than in essay 1, they also tried to evaluate and interpret the sources. In essay 3 there was a qualitative shift in verbs and expressions used to introduce the sources, with some of them having evaluative meaning:
(12) Anastasia Dmitruk in her video message that begins with the words “We will never be brothers” blames Russian people for inability to be free and independent.
Hedges and boosters
To identify the degree of assertiveness in students’ claims the use of hedges and boosters was analyzed. It has been found that in general hedges are not frequently used in the essays. The most common expressions (those that are used more than once) are presented in Table 4.
The analysis shows that there have been practically no changes in the use of hedges. And though there can be found some good examples of even clusters of hedges (13), the overall frequencyhas declined.
(13) I may guess that this couldhe one of the reasons of a different attitude towards cheating and work.
One of the possible reasons for such a low frequency of hedges might be the fact that we, instructors, have very often stressed the importance of present-
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF STANCE-TAKING STRATEGIES IN L2 STUDENTS’ACADEMIC ESSAYS
Table 4
Most commonly used hedges
Essay 1 Essay 2 Essay 3
Can 23 13 19
May 11 14 15
Seem 8 6 8
Probably 8 4 1
Kind of, sort of 8 4 3
Maybe 6 7 4
Might 7 2
Could 2 4 3
Perhaps 2 2 2
Certain 2 2
70(5.1 per 1.000 words) 63 (4.9 per 1.000 words) 56 (4.6 per 1.000 words)
ing an argument, so the students might have had an impression that ‘presenting an argument’ means being absolutely sure in that argument. And though the students were encouraged not to be too categorical in their statements, to soften their claims, they seem to have achieved it not by increasing the frequency of hedges, but by decreasing the frequency ofboosters.
It has been mentioned earlier that in essay 1 the claims that students made were in many cases very strong. Using the terminology of Hyland we might even say that students ‘over-boost their propositions’ in an attempt to put forward arguments convincingly (Hyland, 2012):
(14) It is absolutely obvious that families have changed in recent times in both countries, but it is also clear that diversity of new types of families is due to socio-economic factors and gender differences.
Table 5 presents the frequency of the most common boosters found in students’ essays.
The results show that though the frequency of boosters is rather high compared to that of hedges, the number of boosters used in essay 3 is much lower (by one third) than that in essay 1 and 2. It might suggest that students tried to soften their claims by being not very assertive.
Conclusion
The linguistic analysis of essays written by Russian students during the course identified slight changes in the way they take stance in writing. It has been shown
Table 5
Most commonly used boosters
Essay 1 Essay 2 Essay 3
Of course 24 14 6
Really 16 25 11
Should 16 17 11
Believe 10 7 7
the fact that 10 6 6
Absolutely 8 4 2
Always 7 8 5
Actually 7 5 4
Certainly 4 1 1
Obvious(ly) 6 7
Never 5 5 5
Sure 4 5 3
No doubt, undoubtedly 4 5 5
Clear(ly) 3 2 1
Need 3 2 3
In fact 3 2 4
Must 2 3 2
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IRINA SHCHEMELEVA
that at the very beginning (essay 1) the students were very assertive in their claims and judgments, while in essay 3 their assertiveness declined and the claims sounded less categorical. In essay 3 students also relied more on class readings and other sources in their argumentation. And though development of Russian students’ academic writing skills was not among the goals of the course, the fact that the students were constantly engaged in reading and evaluating texts written by their peers abroad influenced to some extent their own writing. It might be suggested that when the students find themselves in an international context, with some students being more experienced in academic writing, they might learn not only from instructors, but also from their peers. Given limited experience gained from only one course, the conclusions are preliminary and should be explored further in future research.
The course evaluations of both Russian and American students identified critical thinking as a key learning outcome and, quite surprisingly, four Russian students mentioned that they acquired a new skill of essay writing:
“I also got a lot of wise pieces of advice about how to analyze, write essay properly and make my writing coherent” (from a student’s course evaluation).
At the same time, “The Net Generation” course demonstrated that in university contexts where English is not the main medium of instruction novice L2 writers need special training or assistance in academic writing in English. In such a situation course instructors and academic program directors should consider the ways of implementing Writing Across Curriculum approach into the teaching.
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