Stance and Reader Positioning in Upper-Level Student Writing in Political Theory and Economics.

Writing in the Disciplines and Writing Across the Curriculum;Authorial Stance and Reader Positioning;Discourse Analysis of Student Writing;Systemic Functional Linguistics;Academic Writing;Dialogism;English Language and Literature;Linguistics;Education;Humanities;Social Sciences;English and Education

Lancaster, Carlton IsaacBarton, Ellen L. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Writing in the Disciplines and Writing Across the Curriculum;    Authorial Stance and Reader Positioning;    Discourse Analysis of Student Writing;    Systemic Functional Linguistics;    Academic Writing;    Dialogism;    English Language and Literature;    Linguistics;    Education;    Humanities;    Social Sciences;    English and Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/93976/zakland_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation project examines patterns of stance in essays written by high- and low-performing students in two upper-level undergraduate courses, one in political theory and the other in economics. It employs methods of linguistic discourse analysis, drawing largely on Appraisal Theory (a subset of Systemic Functional Linguistics), in combination with methods from corpus linguistics and theoretical insights from rhetorical genre studies. It examines how recurring patterns of stance in students;; essays correspond to the goals and assessment criteria for writing in the courses, as revealed through interviews with the instructors and analysis of selected course material. Through this robust set of analytic approaches, the study aims to make explicit patterns of stance in student writing that correlate with high- and low-graded essays and with the disciplinary contexts. The broader aim is to render explicit patterns of interpersonal meanings constructed in students;; texts that construe such abstract qualities as critical reasoning, complexity and nuance in argumentation, and control of the discourse—featuresidentified by the instructors as valued in student writing. The study contributes to the field of composition and rhetoric by pinpointing discursive resources that enable some student writers to construct more discipline-congruent styles of argumentation than others. Specific findings show that, while the two essay assignments require different ways of using language to construct valued stances, the high-performing writers in both contexts more consistently construct a ;;novice academic;; stance while the low-performing writers more consistently construct a ;;student;; stance. The former is marked by the rhetorical qualities of contrastiveness, dialogic control, critical distance, and discoursal alignment, or assimilation of the disciplinary discourse. In contrast, the ;;student” stance is marked by frequent personalizing moves, repeated references to the classroom discourse, and comparatively infrequent use of discursive resources that construe the rhetorical qualities listed above. These findings have implications for instruction in writing in the disciplines (WID) contexts, specifically in terms of how instructors can refine their metalanguage about writing for discussing stance with students explicitly and in detail.