The operation of value in undergraduate English language essays
نویسنده
چکیده
The construction of meaning in texts inevitably involves the expression of value judgments (Mirskin, 1995) as well as other types of writer evaluation. This paper explores the expression of value in argumentative English language essays written by first year undergraduates. Hunston’s (1989) evaluation of value which essentially involves qualitative judgements along the good–bad cline is used to identify certain categories of value that operate in these essays. The effectiveness of these categories of value in the construction of arguments is also discussed with reference to comments given by a content expert to provide a better understanding of their significance in the given writing task.
منابع مشابه
Construction of Evaluative Meanings by Kurdish-Speaking Learners of English: A Comparison of High- and Low-Graded Argumentative Essays
Academic writing ability is an important goal that learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) try to attain. While ESL students’ academic writings have been widely explored, owing to few studies investigating appraisal resources in EFL students’ argumentative writing, the gap still exists about EFL students’ academic writing. This study aimed to see ho...
متن کاملA Corpus-based Analysis of Epistemic Stance Adverbs in Essays Written by Native English Speakers and Iranian EFL Learners
Academic essays entail taking a stance on the truth value of propositions. Epistemic adverbs deal with the speaker's assessment of the truth value of propositions. Employing a corpus-based approach with descriptive statistics and qualitative description, this study explored the use of epistemic stance adverbs in academic essays written by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners. Follow...
متن کاملMetadiscourse Markers in a Corpus of Learner Language: The Case of Iranian EFL Learners
Different issues have been probed in learner corpus research since the late 1980s.However, taking the im- portance of meta discourse markers (MDMs) in signposting academic discourse, their use in Iranian EFL learners‟ academic essays is an area of research in need of a more serious analysis. Contributing to this line of investigation, this paper reports a corpus-based study of the use of MDMs i...
متن کاملSpeech-like Pragmatic Markers in Argumentative Essays Written by Iranian EFL Students and Native English Speaking Students
In this study, the use of speech-like pragmatic markers in Iranian EFL students’ academic writing was investigated. Speech-like pragmatic markers, such as I think, well, I guess, actually, anyway, anyhow, etc. are linguistic components that are more specific to conversation than writing, and writers may wrongly include them in their academic writing. To examine the students’ use of speech-like ...
متن کاملSpeech-like Pragmatic Markers in Argumentative Essays Written by Iranian EFL Students and Native English Speaking Students
In this study, the use of speech-like pragmatic markers in Iranian EFL students’ academic writing was investigated. Speech-like pragmatic markers, such as I think, well, I guess, actually, anyway, anyhow, etc. are linguistic components that are more specific to conversation than writing, and writers may wrongly include them in their academic writing. To examine the students’ use of speech-like ...
متن کامل