Employment of stance adverbials as hedges and boosters in argumentative essays of native american and nonnative Turkish university students

The growth of discourse analysis as a key tool in understanding language use, has led to the idea of the importance of interaction in writing. Thus, the concept of metadiscourse has emerged as a way of representing the writer's awareness of the unfolding text as discourse. Metadiscourse is based on a view of writing as social engagement and especially considered to be essential element of persuasive and argumentative writing (Crismore & Farnsworth 1990; Hyland, 2004). Among the metadiscourse markers, hedges and boosters are two crucial devices helping writers to express their authorial stance in their products. Writing argumentative texts is a challenge for the students not only in their mother tongue but also in their foreign language(s). They seem to experience difficulties in producing texts, which clearly interact with the reader(s), guide the reader in the process of reception and interpretation of the text and convince the potential reader of the text. Research on students' argumentative writing is relatively little compared to descriptive, narrative, and expository writing (e.g. Stephens, 2003). For example, two of the related studies have focused on comparison of native speakers with advanced Spanish university writers (ICLE corpus) (Neff, Ballesteros, Dafouz, Martínez & Rica, 2004) and the Greek advanced learners of English (Hatzitheodorou & Mattheoudakis, 2007). More texts need to be analyzed to gain a deeper understanding about how and effective authorial stance is presented. In the Turkish context, the students are not offered an explicit instruction in authorial stance taking and employing stance devices, instead, they are provided with very general writing guidelines and there is a scarcity of study examining comparatively native American and Turkish non-native EFL learners' employment of stance devices as hedges and boosters in their English argumentative writings. Therefore, a detailed and comparative analysis needs to be conducted in order to gain a deeper understanding about how stance-taking is presented by non- native and native students. So this study aims to identify the stance adverbials used as hedges and boosters employed by native American and Turkish non-native students. This study specifically based on the stance adverbials as they expose the author's comment or attitude much clearer. The data of this study consist of the argumentative essays of the native American students (from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays - LOCNESS corpus) and of the Turkish non-native students from the corpus of argumentative essays written by Turkish students, majoring in the first year of English Language Teaching Department at Anadolu University. Simple random sampling is used in order to choose 200 argumentative essays (100 from each student group) and native corpus consists of 84,851 words whereas non-native corpus consists of 86,554 words. The data are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, percentages, mean frequencies per 10,000 words and Log-likelihood results for each item are calculated and interpreted. The stance adverbials as hedges and boosters are identified with the help of a concordance program, Ant. Conc. 3.3.4. and analyzed in their own contexts manually using Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, checked twice and the results are inter-rated by another researcher by using peer debriefing system. The functional use of stance adverbials as hedges and boosters are analyzed in their own contexts and explained in detail. The results of the study show that argumentative essays of students are characterized by extensive use of boosters, and less limited use of hedges and it is found out that Turkish non-native students use more diverse hedges and boosters than native American students use in their argumentative essays. Functional uses of each adverbial are explained, examples from the essays are also presented. The results of this study are believed to create an awareness among both the teachers and the students both in theoretical and linguistic aspects. Keywords: argumentative writing, corpus, hedges and boosters, stance adverbials