STANCE IN MULTILINGUAL WRITING: A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF FIRST YEAR STUDENTS’ ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS IN THE HUMANITIES

Back to Page Authors: Nomsa C. Zindela

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Keywords: writing, stance, multilingual, academic

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Abstract: The renewed interest in multilingualism and trans-languaging has given rise to both empirical and theoretical research pertaining to English and African Languages in South Africa. The writing of multilingual first-year students at university deserves attention in studies on stance. Teaching and assessment of evaluative language continue to be conducted from English language monolingual perspectives, not taking into account the multilingual repertoires that students bring into the writing. Using 100 first- year argumentative essays drawn from the Tshwane Learner Corpora (TLC) (Van Rooy, 2009), this paper answers two questions: what linguistic markers of stance do first-year humanities students use in their argumentative essay writing? What functions do the stance markers serve in the students’ writing? This study uses the textual analytical methods for qualitative analysis and Wordsmith tools (7.0) for the automated disambiguation to identify the linguistic markers of stance in the corpora. The Appraisal theory from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is used as the main stance analysis framework. The study has revealed that multilingual in a South African academic context encode their stances differently, uncovering socio-pragmatic dimensions of the language of evaluation in operation in multilingual contexts. This study is important for the decolonization discourses that currently occupy language teaching/learning debates in multilingual research contexts. Van Rooy, B. 2009. Tswana learner English corpus. (In Granger, S., Dagneaux, E., Meunier, F. & Paquot, M., eds. International corpus of learner English handbook and CD-ROM. Version 2. p. 198-204).

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