Taking a stand: Stance strategies in l1 serbian english learners’ expository essays

Abstract

An important part of undergraduate essay writing is the argumentative/persuasive essay genre, which has been described as one of the keys to academic success in higher education (Chandrasegaran and Kong, 2006). It requires not only grammatical fluency and appropriate cohesion, but also that the author be able to take a stand on a particular issue. In an attempt to understand what strategies Serbian L1 English learners at the tertiary level use to take a stand, we analyzed a corpus of their expository (argumentative and opinion) essays. The essays were analyzed and coded for various linguistic structures used to convey taking a stand. These include nouns which are preceded by a sentence initial deictic This as a structure which encapsulates previous propositions, reported speech used to assign a stance to and take a stand on the reported speaker and the event, the passive voice, demonstrative pronouns, and the like. The quantitative analysis of this material was carried out with the aim of presenting our findings in the light of possible implications for teaching expository/persuasive writing at the tertiary level to NNS of English, in an attempt to bridge the intercultural gap that any NNS faces when forced to express their opinions in a language other than their own.