Exploring EFL Writers' Authorial Voice in Academic Discussions: A Graduation-Based Appraisal Analysis

Authorial voice, one of those constructs that shapes how writers establish their stance with scholarly discourse, lies within the centrality of academic writing. While extensively studied in Applied Linguistics, authorial voice has been primarily explored through stance markers, personal pronouns, and engagement strategies, with relatively little attention given to its construction through the Graduation system of the Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics. This study, therefore, examines how Vietnamese EFL writers employ Graduation resources to construct their authorial voice in the discussion sections of TESOL theses to bridge the gap. Using the Appraisal framework, a corpus of 15 theses was compiled and analyzed to identify patterns of Graduation use and their impact on voice projection. The findings uncover the predominance of Force-based Graduation, particularly the linguistic resources of Intensification and Quantification, over Focus-based Graduation. This suggests that EFL writers tend to strengthen or weaken meanings rather than redefine categorical boundaries. The study also identifies three levels of authorial voice by Vietnamese EFL writers, namely, explicit, implicit, and unclear, depending on how Graduation resources are employed. While these strategies enhance persuasion, they may also limit critical engagement with existing research. Given the insights, explicit instruction on voice-related linguistic features is necessitated.