Comparison of Authorial Stance Between Professional and Amateur Writers in Scientific Correspondence Writing

Writing argumentative correspondences is an art requiring linguistic and rhetorical skills to bring forth the ultimate effect of persuading the audience. However, instruction of this critical language art has been underrepresented in Thai tertiary educational contexts. This study is based on an interventional experiment of teaching an ESP-Science course to 40 students majoring in science, with a strong emphasis on linguistic devices for academic interaction, consisting of stance and engagement marking, as elaborated in Hyland (2005a, 2005b). The interventional experiment made use of the 240 correspondences taken from the scientific journal Nature with the duration of 30 hours over a 10-week period. This study reports the findings from a comparison of the students’ writing before and after the intervention and a comparison of the students’ post-experiment writing and the experts’ writing. The analysis is based on content analysis, inter-rater assessment, and descriptive statistics, and shows that a meaningful level of progress has been obtained as a result of the intervention. The progress is evident in not only that students’ post-experiment writing exceeds in quality their pre-experiment writing, but also that students’ post-experiment writing has become similar to the expert writing to a great extent, with respect, in particular, to the strategic patterns of stance and engagement marking. The success of a relatively short intervention, i.e., 10 weeks, calls for implementation of courses using authentic correspondences in ESP-Science classes, or more broadly, in ESP courses in diverse disciplines (237/250).