Constraints on authorial stance in accounting PhD theses in a Nigerian university

Abstract

Scholars have argued that disciplinary discourse, linguistic features and epistemology vary across disciplines, contexts, as well as genres. In this paper, we investigate what stance linguistic features accounting PhD authors use in Bayero University Kano and what factors might constrain their use. Baynham (2001) has argued there are three perspectives on the study of academic writing, a skills-based perspective, a text-based perspective and a practice-based perspective. In this paper we draw primarily on a text-based analysis but complement this with a consideration of institutional and disciplinary factors which might explain why the writers investigated write as they do. The study combines text analysis using a corpus methodology and contextual information on the institutional and disciplinary context within which the students are writing. We employ nine participants: six accounting PhD authors and three accounting PhD supervisors. We compile a corpus of six accounting PhD theses from Bayero University, Kano (BUK corpus), as well as two other accounting sub-corpora written by native speakers of English in the same discipline of accounting for comparative analysis with the BUK corpus: a thesis of accounting PhD thesis (UK corpus); and a corpus of eleven journal articles of accounting (JAA corpus). The corpus analysis shows that all the three corpora frequently use hedges with a higher frequency than the other stance linguistic features categories, followed by boosters, then attitudinal markers, and explicit self-mention features. However, the chi-square results show that the differences among the three corpora use of stance linguistic features are not significant. The contextual data suggests that several factors might have constrained the accounting PhD authors' use of stance linguistic features, such as a lack of teaching of EAP/ESP to the postgraduate students. We finish by advocating more broadly a genre-sensitive, functional approach to the teaching of academic writing which would include explicit teaching of stance linguistic features for example by using a concordance software. Learners could in this way explore a wide range of stance linguistic features, and could see and analyse the text looking at the cotext/context. We conclude by emphasizing the value of raising the awareness of both teachers and students regarding the use of stance linguistic features in their academic writing.