A corpus-based study of stance markers in academic thesis writing by L2 undergraduates

The study of stance is an increasingly prominent area of research in academic and business writing. This study investigates the use of stance markers in two significant genres in higher education: L2 learners of business academic theses by and L1 British native learners. The study uses a corpus of maritime L2 learners and British Academic Writing English (BAWE) as a reference corpus for the corpus linguistic analysis. The study makes use of mixed methods to assess the L2 writing of maritime university L2 learners. The study demonstrates that the precise markers used to indicate stance, including both epistemic and textual cues, can differentiate between different levels of student writing. The results of the study indicate that there are two consistent stance expectations observed in many genres. Based on analysis of the data, the study shows that BEC 2018 features considerably greater number boosters than the BAWE and BEC 2017 corpuses. At the same time, when compared against the non-native BAWE corpus, hedging was found to be more frequently employed within the non-native BEC corpus. Additionally, there are notable differences between argumentative and explanatory writing in terms of the use of stance markers that amplify and contrast ideas.