Engagement and stance in academic writing: A study of English and Persian research articles

Abstract

Written texts of any kind embody some interactions between writers and their potential readers. This study focused on academic writing to find about linguistic features used by writers to create such interactions. Following Hyland's (2005) model of interaction in which stance and engagement are introduced as two discoursal features having an effective role in constructing writer-reader interactions, this study aimed at investigating the ways in which English and Persian academics express their position to discover the strategies used to bring readers to their writing. To this end, 120 English and Persian research articles in two disciplines of Chemistry and Sociology were analyzed for the purposes of cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary comparison. The results demonstrated that the writers of both disciplines, especially the sociologists, considered the expression of stance and engagement markers in their writing important. However, in sociology articles there was a greater effort to interact with readers. Further, in Persian there seemed to be more cases of readers' involvement.