Laura Aull

Linguistic Markers of Stance in Early and Advanced Academic Writing A Corpus-based Comparison

This article uses corpus methods to examine linguistic expressions of stance in over 4,000 argumentative essays written by incoming first-year university students in comparison with the writing of upper-level undergraduate students and published academics. The findings reveal linguistic stance markers shared across the first-year essays despite differences in students’ educational context, with greatest distinctions emerging between first-year writers and all of the more advance writers. The specific features of stance that point to a developmental trajectory are approximative hedges/boosters, code glosses, and adversative/contrast connectors. The findings suggest methodological and conceptual implications: They highlight the value of descriptive, corpus-based studies of incoming first-year writing compared to advanced academic writing, and they underscore the construction of academic stance—particularly via certain stance features—as a process of delimiting one’s stance in a way that accounts for the views of others.

First-Year Writing Today

The cry that new college students can’t write is old and persistent. In the 1870s, Harvard University’s president railed against incoming students’ “incorrectness” and “inelegance” in writing, spurring several literacy crisis reports under the title “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” In 1975, a Newsweek article bearing the same name suggested that most graduating secondary students were not “able to write English at the minimal college level” (Sheils, 1975, p. 58). In 2011, The Guardian reported that across England, both “non-traditional” and “traditional” new college students were struggling with essay writing (Tickle, 2011). And recent U.S. descriptions suggest the same, going as far as to label new college students the “dumbest generation” (Bauerlein, 2008; Holland, 2013; Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, & Newsom, 2009). More tempered accounts, stemming from research across the world, also note a mismatch between secondary and college writing: “The academic prose of students is a reflection of the gap between secondary and post-secondary contexts,” write Carmen Sancho Guinda and Ken Hyland; as a result, “learners [are] bridging the gap through imitation and self-discovery” (2012, p. 6).

Linguistically Informed Pedagogical Applications

Much of this book identifies recurring linguistic features of first-year (FY) and expert academic writing and considers why such analysis is rare and valuable: Chapters 1 and 2 contextualize the lack of linguistic attention in studies of FY writing; and Chapters 3, 4, and 6 discuss analysis of FY linguistic and rhetorical patterns that contrast expert writing and that are related to prompt cues.

Implications and Lingering Questions

In his history of first-year (FY) writing instruction, James Berlin writes that as higher education began to expand, it privileged a “certain version” of English, imposing lasting standards that are “clearly dialectal biases of a particular class” (1984, pp. 72–73). Given that FY instructors are charged as the “caretakers” of this version of English—a tool for upward mobility and “the good things in life”—the importance of FY writing for student access is clear. What is often less clear is what exemplifies the version of English expected in FY and more advanced academic writing. There are recurring language-level patterns that characterize academic writing and constitute its attendant standards, but they are often tacit and are rarely the focus of FY writing research or instruction.

Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Scope and Certainty in FY and Expert Writing

Genre studies today emphasize variation as well as repeating features. John Swales writes that “exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality” (1990, p. 49). Carolyn Miller describes that genres are recognizable through recurring fusions of form with substance (1984, pp. 159–161). Amy Devitt underscores both ideas when she writes: “where there are both standards and variations, there is meaning” (2004, p. 150). But even variety depends upon typified features: “Were there just variation and no standardization, meaning would also be impossible … Genre and language standards in fact accentuate the places of variation and choice by delimiting that variation and choice” (2004, p. 150). It is this standardization in genres, specifically in repeating features that characterize first-year (FY) and expert academic writing, that motivates the analysis in this chapter.

Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies in English: A History and a (Genre-Based) Way Forward

Academic writing is a central focus of two disciplines in English language studies today: rhetoric-composition and applied linguistic English for academic purposes (EAP). These fields approach academic writing differently—as a more sociorhetorical object or a more linguistic one, respectively—which is one reason why first-year (FY) writing studies, primarily under the purview of rhetoric-composition, has not been more influenced by developments in EAP.1 The particular institutional formation of U.S. English language studies helps explain how this happened. By the late 20th century, as rhetoric-composition formed to serve native English-speaking students and EAP studies formed to serve non-native English-speaking students, rhetoric and linguistics had long been part of separate disciplinary traditions. These disciplinary pathways continue to keep EAP and rhetoric-composition largely separate, though both are dedicated to studying written academic English and creating resources that make academic discourse more transparent for student learners.2

Context-Informed Corpus Linguistic Analysis of FY Writing

A historical look at first-year (FY) writing illustrates its importance in access to higher education. It also shows how FY writing has been commonly conceptualized in rhetoric-composition research and pedagogy: as whole texts in particular contexts. How FY writing appears through a more linguistic lens—as constituted by shared, language-level features across many contexts—is a different question. That question is more easily answered via corpus linguistic analysis, a method that is predictably rare in studies of FY writing given the conceptual focus of rhetoric-composition. Yet another question is how FY writing might appear if we combined the two conceptualizations and approached FY writing as both whole text enactments in contexts and as patterns of discourse across them.