Comparing Stance in Chinese EFL learners’ English and Chinese argumentative essays of a shared topic

Writers’ stance can be communicated by various linguistic means in both English and Chinese. Previous research (Camiciottoli 2004; Neff 2004; Xu 2007; Liang 2008) shows that L2 learners of English, even for advanced learners, are not capable of taking their stance appropriately in English. This study takes a contrastive approach to examine the stance markers in 122 pieces of Chinese learners’ English and Chinese argumentative essays of a shared topic “Is the Internet a blessing or a curse?” Each learner was asked to write an English essay first and then the other one in Chinese. An annotation scheme of stance marking categories (epistemic, deontic, attitudinal and textual) was devised to manually annotate the 122 parallel texts. The results show that the overall occurrences of stance markers in the 61 English texts are considerably correlated (r = .592) with those in the 61 corresponding Chinese texts. Namely, in terms of stance marking, Chinese learners’ English essays share the tendency of their Chinese essays. A closer look at individual stance categories specifies that epistemic, attitudinal and textual markers are correlated with their Chinese counterparts at r = .306, r = .578, r = .444 respectively, with attitudinal the highest. This coincides with Xu (2007) in that Chinese learners of English tend to be unduly involved with personal judgments and attitudes in academic writing. The follow-up concordance analysis of the texts reveals that Chinese learners of English tend to use similar semantic stance types in two languages on the one hand, and employ lexical and phrasal items, which are literal translations to each other, on the other. The apparent alignment in semantic types and lexical realizations of stance sheds some light of cross-linguistic influence of Chinese on learners’ English writing.