Stance and Engagement in Spoken vs. WrittenAcademic Discourse: A Comparative Study between English Soft Science Lectures and English Soft Science Articles

Stance and Engagement in Spoken vs. WrittenAcademic Discourse: A Comparative Study between English Soft Science Lectures and English Soft Science Articles

Communication of thoughts and ideas across the academic spectrum is substantially more than one-way transfer of propositional information, and of course this involves more than just language. Knowing how to frame and present findings, engaging audience, securing their comprehension and acceptance are part of the discourse competence, since these are as important as ideational dimension (propositional content), applying Hyland’s (2005) model, this study was an attempt to investigate the frequency and functions of stance and engagement markers in spoken versus written academic discourse. To do so, 20 academic English soft science articles written by native English researchers were collected as the written corpus and 20 English academic soft science lectures and seminars by native English lecturers were collected from MICASE to develop the spoken corpus. The results showed that the difference of stance and engagement markers in two corpora were statistically significant; frequency of stance markers were higher in written corpus and hedges (46.7%) were the most frequently used category while self-mentions (55.6%) were the most frequent category in spoken corpus. Although the frequency of the engagement markers was higher in spoken corpus, in both corpora reader pronouns (54.6%, 65.6%) held the first position. This investigation illuminated the crucial role of stance and engagement markers in equipping the English for academic purposes students with the skills necessary to succeed in both spoken and written academic genres.

Communication of thoughts and ideas across the academic spectrum is substantially more than one-way transfer of propositional information, and of course this involves more than just language. Knowing how to frame and present findings, engaging audience, securing their comprehension and acceptance are part of the discourse competence, since these are as important as ideational dimension (propositional content), applying Hyland’s (2005) model, this study was an attempt to investigate the frequency and functions of stance and engagement markers in spoken versus written academic discourse. To do so, 20 academic English soft science articles written by native English researchers were collected as the written corpus and 20 English academic soft science lectures and seminars by native English lecturers were collected from MICASE to develop the spoken corpus. The results showed that the difference of stance and engagement markers in two corpora were statistically significant; frequency of stance markers were higher in written corpus and hedges (46.7%) were the most frequently used category while self-mentions (55.6%) were the most frequent category in spoken corpus. Although the frequency of the engagement markers was higher in spoken corpus, in both corpora reader pronouns (54.6%, 65.6%) held the first position. This investigation illuminated the crucial role of stance and engagement markers in equipping the English for academic purposes students with the skills necessary to succeed in both spoken and written academic genres.