Comparing indicators of authorial stance in psychology students’ writing and published research articles

Abstract

This article presents the results of a pilot study examining the use of first-person pronouns, certain adjectives and grading adverbs in a corpus of 51 French psychology student papers written in English as a second language. These results were compared to a corpus of published psychology articles and to a sub-corpus of psychology student texts from the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE). Strategic use of pairs of evaluative words was found in the students’ texts but not in the published texts. However, the variables of native language and level of field expertise cannot explain all of the variance observed. Future work will improve the validity of the findings by using larger corpora of student and published texts.