A review of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing: A methodological perspective
Introduction
Evaluation is pervasive in academic writing (Hyland, 2005), as academic writers construe evaluative meanings to help convince the readers of their epistemic knowledge claims. Evaluation addresses the interpersonal meanings of language, construing attitude, stance or point of view (e.g., Hood, 2010; Hyland & Diani, 2009), and encompasses both attitudinal features towards entities and epistemic features towards propositions (Fairclough, 2003; Gray & Biber, 2012; Thompson & Hunston, 2000). That is, evaluation is a unified concept integrating two dimensions: the attitudinal dimension which indicates speakers’/writers’ positive or negative feelings towards entities and the propositional dimension which indicates speakers’/writers’ certainty of or commitment to the propositions in terms of reliability or trueness. Therefore, following Hunston and Thompson (2000), this study defines evaluation as writers’ explicit or implicit encodings of their emotions of, viewpoints on, attitudes and positions towards entities or propositions in academic writing.
The past three decades witnessed a proliferation of studies on evaluation conducted under various headings. Generally speaking, earlier studies tended to focus on specific evaluative resources that function on either the attitudinal or the propositional dimension with the latter having received more attention. This is because epistemic meanings are “considerably more important in academic research writing than the attitudinal meanings” (Gray & Biber, 2012, p.19). For example, Ochs and Schieffelin’s (1989) study on affect is one of the rare early endeavors addressing the attitudinal dimension while the multitude of studies like intensity (e.g., Labov, 1984), modality (e.g., Palmer, 1990), hedging (e.g., Crompton, 1997) evidentiality (e.g., Chafe, 1986), and averral and attribution (e.g., Tadros, 1993) address the propositional dimension of evaluation. Among these early studies, the two lines of research on affect and evidentiality have laid particular foundation for the recent conceptions of evaluation (Gray & Biber, 2012). Affect is defined by Ochs and Schieffelin (1989) as “a broader term than emotion which includes feelings, moods, dispositions, and attitudes associated with persons and/or situations” (p. 7), which permeates the entire linguistic system at different levels such as phonological features (e.g., intonation), morpho-syntactic features (e.g., t/v pronouns signifying intimacy/distance), and discourse features (e.g., affective speech acts like teasing and apologizing). For evidentiality, Chafe (1986) defined it as any linguistic expressions of attitudes towards knowledge, and distinguished three aspects of the marking of evidentiality: the reliability of the knowledge itself on a continuum from reliable to unreliable; the mode of knowing as personal belief, hearsay, or deduction; and the source of knowledge such as evidence, the language of others, or hypotheses. Chafe found academic writers were especially concerned with how true something was and constantly indicated their assessments of the reliability of knowledge. Though these studies focused on a unilateral dimension of evaluation, they definitely have laid the groundwork for the later unified view of evaluation. Biber and Finegan (1989), for instance, brought affective and evidential meanings together into their examination of stance features, and Biber and colleagues later developed a more full-fledged analytical framework of stance, as will be discussed in Section 3.
Hunston and Thompson’s (2000) edited book Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse can be considered as a milestone for research on evaluation, in which Thompson and Hunston introduced and explicated the definitions, functions, parameters and instantiations of evaluation. Since then, there have been growing interests in examining the matter. Building on the earlier studies as discussed earlier, recent studies on authorial evaluation tend to cover both the attitudinal and propositional dimensions. Accordingly, systematic frameworks for analyzing evaluation have been developed, and research on evaluation has become even more thriving and insightful. On the other hand, however, the even more diversified array of terminologies related to evaluation in the extant literature such as stance (e.g., Conrad & Biber, 2000), metadiscourse (e.g., Hyland, 2005), appraisal (e.g., Martin & White, 2005), and voice (e.g., Matsuda, 2001) have also contributed to the growing complexity of the whole picture.
Such being the case, a systematic review of research on authorial evaluation is sorely needed, which, unfortunately, is rare so far. One reason for this scarcity lies in the daunting task of sorting the great amount of studies conducted under the great variety of headings adopting different methodological approaches. To fill in the gap, this study aims to first disentangle the complicated literature on authorial evaluation in English academic writing and identify the major strands of research in the field of applied linguistics over the past twenty years, and then focus on the methodological issue and outline the major methodological approaches adopted in the literature. Specifically, this study addresses the following questions: What are the major strands of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing? What are the major methodological approaches to authorial evaluation in English academic writing? And what are the respective strengths and weaknesses of the methodological approaches in revealing authorial evaluation in English academic writing? It is hoped that this review will provide implications for future research on evaluation in English academic writing.
Section snippets
Methodology of review
To identify relevant literature for this review, a systematic search in online databases ProQuest, Elsevier, Springer, SAGE, Taylor and Francis, and Wiley Online Library within the time range from 2000 to 2019 was conducted. Considering the various possible terms used in the literature, search terms evaluation, stance, voice, metadiscourse, appraisal, and academic writing were used. The abstracts and sometimes the whole texts of the studies appeared in the search results were carefully read,
Major strands of research on authorial evaluation
As mentioned above, analytical frameworks incorporating both the attitudinal and propositional dimensions of evaluation have been developed in the past two decades. Therefore, according to the analytical framework being fully or partially applied (if any), four major strands of literature can be identified, namely the stance strand, the metadiscourse strand, the appraisal strand, and the voice strand.
Major methodological approaches
Generally speaking, three major methodological approaches can be identified in the literature on authorial evaluation in English academic writing in the past two decades: the corpus-based approach, the in-depth textual approach, and the ethnographic approach. Table 6 presents an overview of the employment of the approaches, for a fuller picture, please refer to the Appendix. It should be noted that there is no one-to-one correspondence between a methodological approach and a theoretical
Conclusion
The overview of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing shows that different methodological approaches (i.e., corpus-based, in-depth textual, and ethnographic) have been adopted to examine the matter in different contexts, across languages, cultures, disciplines, and times, through different analytical frameworks (e.g., stance, metadiscourse, appraisal) and methods (e.g., text analysis, statistical analysis, interviews, survey). However, it is not difficult to note that the
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jianping Xie: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Investigation, Writing - review & editing.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science, China under 2015 Project Grant [GD15YWW04]; Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China under 2017 Teaching Research Project Grant [GWJY2017004] and Postgraduate Education Innovative Project Grant [19GWYJSCX-09; 20GWYJSCX-07], as well as by China Scholarship Council.
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the Editor for their constructive comments which have greatly helped improve this
Jianping XIE is an associate professor at School of English Education, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Her current research areas include English academic writing, discourse analysis, and English language teaching.
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2023, Journal of English for Academic PurposesComparison-and-contrast in research articles of applied linguistics: A frame-based analysis
2022, LinguaCitation Excerpt :On the one hand, they have applied Swalesian genre-based analyses (Swales, 1990, 2004) to the highly researched genre of research articles (hereafter RAs) and identified the rhetorical functions of semantic units across sections (e.g. Yang and Allison, 2003; Lim, 2006; Bruce, 2009; Kanoksilapatham, 2015; Chen and Li, 2019; Sheldon, 2019). On the other hand, they have adopted the frameworks of stance (Conard and Biber, 2000), metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005) and appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005) to characterise lexical and grammatical expressions of feelings or commitments concerning the propositional content (see Xie, 2020). In contrast, little attention has been paid to the communicative content of texts, with few exceptions (Triki, 2019, 2021; Su and Zhang, 2020).
Jianping XIE is an associate professor at School of English Education, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Her current research areas include English academic writing, discourse analysis, and English language teaching.