Evaluative language in undergraduate academic writing: expressions of attitude as sources of text effectiveness in English as a Foreign Language

1 Introduction

Writing academically in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is widely recognized as central to undergraduate education due to its role as the main means of production and dissemination of knowledge in international contexts (Nesi and Gardner 2012). Academic writing is also considered as an activity which involves complex sets of skills that even expert writers keep on improving after continued experience (Chazal 2014). As part of such complexity, the appropriate expression of interpersonal meanings has been found to be one of the most challenging components when learning how to write academically (Hood 2010), mainly because of the pedagogical challenges involved in an appropriate induction of learners into the linguistic conventions developed by specialized discourse communities to produce interpersonal meanings.

Different from skills and competencies related to the communication of factual information and conventional paradigms of textual organization, construing interpersonal meanings involves the use of linguistic resources to express interaction among speakers, as well as the communication of the feelings and points of view they intend to share (Moss 2011). Interpersonal meanings also convey social roles and evaluations (Hyland 2005), as well as the speakers’ expression of a subjective reality, which conveys social relations, personal values, and different kinds of opinions they want to share with other speakers (Perales et al. 2012). Additionally, the expression of interpersonal meanings relates to authorial presence, also known as stance, in academic texts; “how writers present themselves and express their own views and judgements” in relation to others (Candarli et al. 2015: 193). Because of their discourse semantic nature, the workings of these dynamics and their rhetorical effects might make it harder for learners of EFL academic writing to acquire, observe, and evaluate than grammatical and organizational features, as attested by observations like Lancaster’s (2014), who has referred to interpersonal dynamics as recurring patterns of language use that are difficult to notice from casual scanning.

As explained by Ken Hyland, research has shown that fundamental challenges in teaching and learning interpersonal conventions in writing are found in two main sources of difficulties. For one thing, despite its actual social nature, academic writing may still be regarded as objective, rational and impersonal, which results in a neglection of the fact that academic, disciplinary practices involve variations in systems “of appropriate social engagement with one’s material and one’s colleagues” (Hyland 2004: 11). Additionally, cultural factors that shape students’ expectations, strategies, beliefs and, in general, schemas of knowledge and the whole process of learning also present learners with important challenges; besides the acquisition of grammatical structures, lexical resources, and notions of textual organization, learners writing in EFL have to deal with differences between diverse cultural conceptualizations of knowledge construction and communication. While certain cultures tend to favor “an analytical, questioning, and evaluative stance to knowledge”, others “have a very different perspective that favors conserving and reproducing existing knowledge” (Hyland 2003: 38).

Hyland’s considerations coincide with Chitez and Kruse’s (2012) observations about what they call writing cultures, which result from the fact that “each educational system creates its unique mixture of educational genres, writing/learning practices, assessment procedures, instructional materials, expectations towards writing, and required writing competencies, in varied relationships with the genres and practices of professional or scientific domains” (p. 153). An imminent consequence of this is that communities of learners and individual writers carry particular writing dynamics acquired from their various experiences, many of which differ significantly from each other. Thus, students learning how to write in EFL face the challenge to adjust – to lesser or greater degrees – to generalized conventions according to which they are expected to demonstrate their knowledge by voicing their judgements and putting their opinions forward in certain ways. Adjusting appropriately to such conventions may result in effective writing, which has been defined by Vega (2015) as the instantiation of argumentation which appropriately accommodates to the audience’s framework of attitudes and beliefs, gaining force in its adhesion to the speaker’s proposals.

Based on the consideration that the expression of interpersonal meanings plays an important role in the production of successful written academic texts and, as a result, may represent a significant source of (in)effectiveness in academic writing, several works have analyzed the use of interpersonal resources by undergraduate students in EFL in diverse international contexts. Some of such works have explored this dimension of academic writing from the perspective of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model (Candarli et al. 2015; Crosthwaite and Jiang 2017; Lee and Deakin 2016), while others have adopted the systemic-functional perspective of the appraisal model (Martin and White 2005) as their theoretical and methodological basis (Derewianka 2007; Lee 2008, 2015; Mei 2006, 2007; Ryshina-Pankova 2014).

Despite the abundant production of research this subject has seen around the globe, the exploration of the relationship between interpersonal resources and effectiveness in academic EFL writing has not received much attention in Mexico and Latin America, where most related research has focused on academic writing in Spanish L1 (Castro 2013; Castro and Sánchez 2013; González 2011; Ignatieva 2021; Navarro 2014; Valerdi 2021; Zamudio 2016). It is also worth noticing that, as it will be shown in further sections of this paper, most previous works beyond Latin American contexts have explored the interpersonal discourse of EFL writers from disciplines which require effective communication in English, but not the professional mastery or depth that is expected from future professionals of the English Language and Literature at different levels of linguistic and disciplinary instruction. Such potential mastery and depth in knowledge represent the need to analyze the workings of interpersonal language considering as many realizational variables as possible. Stemming from this, the objective of this paper is to use qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the use of interpersonal resources in a corpus of academic essays written in EFL by Mexican undergraduate students of English Language and Literature at a public university in Central Mexico. This exploration is developed within the framework of Martin and White’s (2005) model of appraisal with specific focus on the system of attitude and the instantiation variables of attitudinal category, realization, explicitness, trigger, and authorship. In this work, I compare the features of attitudinal realizations in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays in order to understand the relationship between the use of attitudinal language and the perceived effectiveness of the essays where it is instantiated. Additionally, the features of the evaluative language in the corpus are observed in relation to the instructional and linguistic experience of the undergraduate authors of the texts, which were classified as basic, intermediate, and advanced.

In the following section, a brief account of the system of attitude is presented with particular focus on the categories that have been analyzed in this research. This is followed by an account of previous works that have explored the relationship between attitudinal language and the (in)effectiveness of academic writing by undergraduate EFL learners from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Then, a description of the mixed methodological approach which was applied in this research is presented. Finally, I report the most significant findings of this work in order to discuss their implications to teaching academic writing in EFL in the Mexican context.

2 The appraisal model and the system of attitude

Martin and White (2005) developed the appraisal model as an extension of the analysis of the interpersonal metafunction proposed in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (1985, 2004). While Halliday describes this metafunction at the lexicogrammar stratum in terms of the clause as an exchange through the system of mood, the appraisal model approaches the expression of feelings, points of view and social relations at the stratum of discourse semantics through the systems of attitude , engagement , and graduation. The first one involves the discursive negotiation of emotion-related meanings (feelings, moral/ethical judgements, and aesthetic responses), while the second one relates to the speaker’s positioning in relation to other voices. The system of graduation has to do with the resources deployed to intensify and attenuate realizations of attitude and engagement (Martin and White 2005).

This paper is concerned with the system of attitude, which encompasses the linguistic expression of emotions and their institutionalization as opinions related to the notions of ethics and aesthetics. The ultimate objective of using these resources is to share subjective points of view for the audience to consider them and, if the discourse is successful, adhere to them. In this sense, the expression of attitude is central for speakers’ argumentation of their positions and the representations of the world they communicate since “it is possible to adhere oneself not only to a thesis, but also to ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling” (Amossy 2009: 67–68). Thus, considering Vega’s definition of effectiveness (2015) as argumentation which accommodates to the audience’s attitudes and beliefs in order to increase its adhesion to the speaker’s proposals, the rhetorical effects of communicating one’s propositions accompanied by attitudinal evaluations may have the potential to enhance the effectiveness of the produced text beyond the scope of its objective contents.

In the model of appraisal, expressions of attitude are analyzed in terms of three sub-systems: affect, judgement, and appreciation. Affect relates to the linguistic realization of feelings, considered as the most basic forms of personal reaction in human linguistic development (Martin 2000; Painter 2003; Torr 1997). These expressions are usually classified into the categories of +/− happiness [“affairs of the heart” (Martin and White 2005: 49)], +/− security (related to ecosocial well-being and sensations of anxiety and confidence), +/− satisfaction (linked to the satisfaction of personal needs and goals) and +/− desire (involving the willingness or attraction towards entities and processes). Prototypically, instances of affect are lexically realized in the form of qualities (attributes and epithets), mental and behavioral processes, and modal adjuncts. Table 1 illustrates examples of affect analyzed in the corpus of this study. The two columns on the right present information about the variables of realization – the lexico-grammatical form – and category – attitudinal sub-type – of each example.

Resources from the judgement and appreciation sub-systems are the result of the modelling and sophistication of affectivity according to social norms and aesthetic parameters produced by social conventions, hence their status as institutionalizations of affect. These institutionalizations represent moral/ethic judgements about people, their actions, and the consequences of their actions, as well as personal considerations about the aesthetic properties of things, processes, and people. Following Martin and White’s (2005) description, expressions of judgement are classified into the categories of +/− normality (how special or unique someone is), +/− capacity (how able a person is), +/− tenacity (how resolute someone is), +/− veracity (related to people’s honesty) and +/− propriety (linked to people’s integrity). Judgement is typically realized through qualities and modal adjuncts (Table 2).

Expressions of appreciation encode aesthetic evaluations of speakers in terms of three categories: +/− reaction (emotional responses provoked by things and processes), +/− composition (perceptions of the balance, regularity, and order of things), and +/− valuation (opinions about the aesthetic and practical value of things). Prototypical realizations of appreciation take the form of qualities and circumstances (Table 3).

The examples of attitude presented up to this point correspond to inscribed realizations; expressions that encode attitude overtly or explicitly. Affect, judgement, and appreciation can also be indirectly invoked. The particularity of invoked realizations of attitude is that they demand a special effort from the audience or interlocutor to identify and process the type of evaluation the speaker is doing. Another peculiarity of this type of realization is that it involves the selection of resources pertaining to the ideational metafunction, which “gives structure to experience, and helps to determine our way of looking at things, so that it requires some intellectual effort to see them in any other way than that which our language suggests to us” (Halliday 2002: 175). Hence observations by Hood and Martin (2005) and Hood (2010) of processes and participants as efficient attitudinal invokers: ideational meanings are seldom neutral, and speakers choose non-inherently evaluative resources for their invoking potential.

attitude is prototypically invoked through lexical metaphors, processes, nominal participants, and nominalizations of processes and qualities. A notorious exception to these invoked realizations is the case of affect, which can be inscribed through mental and behavioral processes. Table 4 illustrates invoked realizations of attitude analyzed in the corpus of this work.

An additional remark on attitudinal invocation relates to potential double coding (Martin and White 2005) resulting from indirect realizations of attitude where a given evaluation from one category may be invoked by means of the inscription of another category as in (1) below. In this example, the author expresses a negative evaluation of a reviewer’s knowledge (appreciation > −composition), which indirectly realizes a negative evaluation about his abilities as a literary analyst (judgement > −capacity). The possibility of finding such types of invoked realizations in discourse represents the need to make methodological decisions regarding the labelling of attitudinal realizations in an analysis, as was the case in this work. Pertinent observations are made later in the Section 4.

For the purposes of this research, additionally to the variables of realization, category and explicitness, the variable of trigger is particularly relevant. This variable indicates the stimulus that motivates an evaluation. For the nature of the essays studied in this work – i.e., essays on literary works from English Literature – triggers of attitude were related to characters, other components of the literary works commented by the authors of the corpus (atmosphere, style, plot, etc.), and entities external to the literary works about which they write in their essays (literary concepts, periods, genres, currents, other works, different authors, etc.). Table 5 illustrates instantiations of attitude with labels of their realization, category, explicitness, and trigger.

3 Research on attitudinal meanings in undergraduate EFL academic writing

The study of the linguistic expression of attitude and its relationship with successful EFL academic writing has received considerable attention in international contexts. Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) analyzed a corpus of argumentative essays written by postgraduate Kurdish-speaking Iranian students of TEFL to explore whether appraisal resources can be used as a reference to evaluate argumentative writing in low- and high-graded essays. These authors found that higher proportions of attitude were characteristic of more successful texts, although both groups of texts were similar in a tendency to use more judgement and appreciation than affect. Additionally, high-graded essays displayed significantly more invoked affect through nominalizations and more inscribed valuation than low-graded texts, which tended to inscribe affect through mental processes and to invoke valuation. In terms of judgement, the main contrast between both sub-corpora lied in the selection of sub-categories, with high-graded essays mainly displaying resources of capacity and low-graded texts mainly instantiating normality. Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) conclude that, although clear tendencies showed that more successful essays tend to display more attitude , punctual instantiations suggested that “in assessing the essays as high- or low-graded, more important than the number of appraisal markers exploited in essays was how these resources were employed” (p. 75). This conclusion coincides with observations by Hunston (2011), Hunston and Su (2019), and Valerdi (2021), who have pointed at the centrality of lexico-grammatical patterns and the strategic use of evaluative language in argumentative structures over low or high proportions of appraisal resources in texts.

Reaching similar conclusions, Myskow and Ono (2018) studied how Japanese undergraduate students of Law and Political Science used resources of affect, judgement and appreciation as part of their arguments’ justifying evidence in a corpus of 62 biographical essays. Having rated the texts as either high or low on the basis of a self-designed rubric, these authors found that both low- and high-rated essays displayed similar proportions of general attitudinal appraisal, with judgement as the most prevalent type of evaluation. Here, the relevant contrasts took place in terms of the most frequently used sub-systems in each group of texts, with high-rated essays displaying higher proportions of appreciation and judgement, and low-rated texts displaying more resources of affect. Additionally, for these researchers, what students found challenging was not the selection of particular attitudinal categories, but finding appropriate grammatical constructions for them to support their arguments; they noticed students relied heavily on attributes to inscribe conclusive evaluations about people. Myskow and Ono (2018) suggest writing teachers should not encourage learners to adopt critical perspectives through heavily polarized inscriptions, but to integrate evaluations with evidence in support of their conclusions through particular grammatical constructions.

In a work that explores the relationship between undergraduate students’ lack of critical voice and limitations in the management of evaluative language, Lee (2015) compared high- and low-graded persuasive essays written by native (Australian) and non-native (South Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese) undergraduate EAP students to identify how evaluative language contributes to academic writing success. In that study, native and non-native writers deployed judgement and appreciation ten times more frequently than affect. When focusing on appreciation resources, the author found that valuation was predominantly more used over expressions of composition and reaction, which they interpretated as a subject-specific particularity. When contrasting low- and high-graded essays, Lee found that less successful texts displayed affect-related reaction twelve times more frequently than successful essays. Additionally, she found that high-graded essays by both native and non-native writers displayed similar tendencies, with frequent use of judgement-invoking valuations. In 2008, Lee had reported very similar tendencies in a study based on a remarkably similar corpus, with high-graded essays deploying significantly more varied attitudinal resources – mainly invoked evaluations of judgment – and depersonalized attitude – in the form of nominalizations – than low-graded texts. For Lee (2015), shaping an appropriate use of evaluative language is key in EAP instruction, where “students’ exposure to the appraisal system helps them to acquire the relevant English Language skills including grammar and vocabulary most effectively in a context-appropriate manner” (p. 73).

In a work which supports Lee’s (2015) position, Bahmani et al. (2021) propose the model of appraisal as a pedagogical tool to help EAP writers show their critical stance in their texts. To support their claim, the authors developed an experimental study at an Iranian university, comparing the writing successfulness of an experimental group of 30 postgraduate students of English Language Teaching to that of a control group with the same number of students. The experimental group received writing instruction with explicit explanations and analyses of attitude and graduation. On the basis of standardized pre-tests and post-tests applied to both groups, Bahmani et al. concluded that explicit instruction on the use of evaluative language enabled the experimental group to perform more successfully in contrast with the control group, which did not improve its performance significantly.

Besides research based on appraisal analysis, the role of attitudes in academic writing in EFL has seen remarkable contributions developed through applications of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model. Despite general differences between metadiscourse and appraisal, both models have been found to share remarkable similarities in their conceptualization of linguistic attitudes (Du et al. 2023): linguistic resources that “indicate the writer’s affective […] attitude to propositions” via markers of surprise, agreement, frustration, importance, etc. (Hyland 2005: 53). In this paper, key metadiscourse works are worth mentioning for their special focus on contrasting less or more effective texts on the basis of their attitudinal features.

One of such works is that by Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017), who support the idea that successful attitudinal conventions can stem from instruction in academic writing. They explored how explicit instruction on the use of attitudinal metadiscourse affects the development of stance features in essays and reports. The authors investigated the development of attitude markers and other metadiscoursal resources during one semester of EAP instruction to undergraduate students from various disciplines in Hong Kong. After analyzing written samples before, during, and after explicit instruction, Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) found that undergraduate authors had reduced their use of attitudinal markers significantly in their texts. Additionally, when they graded the same written samples, they found that interpersonal features developed through instruction were more likely to have a positive impact on evaluators. For these authors, “the ability to express a relevant and plausible stance is a crucial indicator of writing quality and development” (p. 94). As challenging as this has been proved to be, such ability can be trained in undergraduate students, who enter university writing privileging their attitudes about their claims and their positions, but may be instructed to develop a new academic voice, “gaining control over the rhetorical and linguistic aspects of academic discourse via the use of a more careful, narrower, less polarising and less personal range of expressions with which to convey their attitudes on a given topic” (p. 102).

Lee and Deakin (2016) looked more closely at the role of attitudinal metadiscourse markers in the effectiveness of undergraduate writing in EFL by analyzing essays written by Chinese learners enrolled in their first or second writing course at a university in the United States. The essays had been rated through a standardized grading rubric either as low or high. Lee and Deakin (2016) found that authors of successful essays had a tendency to include significantly more attitudinal markers than less successful essays. Additionally, these authors observed that attitudinal resources in high-rated texts displayed more varied lexico-grammatical realizations. In these authors’ corpus, the expression of authorial stance through attitude seems to be an important factor of success. Nevertheless, compared to other types of stance markers – namely hedges, boosters, self-mention, and engagement markers –, they observe that attitudinal resources are among the least used expressions of interpersonal meanings in both low- and high-rated essays. These findings can be related to those by Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) in that not only do linguistic realizations of attitude seem to be modulated by EFL writers when writing in English, but they also appear to stem from effective instruction that results in the acquisition of rhetorical conventions of academic EFL writing. Adhering to or neglecting such conventions affects the impression of (in)effectiveness of undergraduate academic texts.

These works have explored and confirmed, to varying degrees and from interrelated perspectives, the possibility to link the use of evaluative attitudinal language to effectiveness in academic EFL writing in different international contexts. The following section presents a description of the methodological approach that was applied in this research in order to explore such relationship in the Mexican context. This will be followed by a report of the results obtained.

4 Methodology

The purpose of this paper is to analyze realizations of attitude in undergraduate academic essays in EFL in order to determine if their attitudinal features represent a potential source of text (in)effectiveness beyond lexicogrammatical and structural considerations. This is done through a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, comparing the deployment of resources from the three attitude sub-systems in essays written by Mexican undergraduate students from different instructional levels of the major on English Language and Literature at a public university in Central Mexico.

The major in English Language and Literature consists of eight consecutive semesters. Students entering the first semester must provide evidence of having completed three years of EFL instruction during their high school studies. Additionally, they must pass an exam that determines whether they possess competencies equivalent to band B2 from the Common European Framework. As part of their studies in the major, they study four 16-week language courses during the first four semesters (one course per semester). From the fifth to the eight semesters, their training in the language takes place through specialized content subjects that are taught in English. These subjects include advanced English Literature courses where essay writing is a regular instructional and evaluative practice.

5 Results

6 Discussion

The results of this research show a meaningful relationship between the use of attitudinal evaluation in undergraduate academic EFL writing and the production of effective texts in the context of the analyzed corpus. In this section, this is shown by discussing the results from general to particular starting with a global scenario of the corpus, then looking at attitudinal features of the texts according to their instructional levels, and finally discussing attitude in relation to the essays’ perceived effectiveness. Following this order, it will be easier to relate the findings to attitudinal features in general undergraduate academic writing and then observe specific features where perceived effectiveness in the texts plays a distinctive role in the corpus of this work.

7 Conclusions

As the findings of this work have shown, the construction of interpersonal relationships through the use of linguistic resources of attitude plays an important role in the perceived effectiveness of undergraduate EFL academic writing at different levels of experience and disciplinary instruction, which indicates the importance of broadening assessment criteria of academic writing beyond the constraints of lexicogrammatical accuracy and text structure, as well as pertinent observations about attitudinal positioning in instructional processes, in favor of deeper interpersonal metalinguistic awareness in both students and writing instructors. In order to face these instructional challenges, it is important to emphasize the results also show that the influence of attitudinal language in the (in)effectiveness of academic texts is furtherly determined by a complex series of contextual factors including discursive authority, writing experience, discipline-specific focus objects, and the multi-faceted writing-related cultural background of writers.

These conclusions are supported by six main findings that have been reported in this paper: 1) In adherence to general academic writing, the corpus displays a significantly low occurrence of attitude resources, which results from a strategic deployment of interpersonal resources by writers as to what is evaluated in their texts and in what ways; 2) General attitudinal features in the corpus privilege appreciation as the most frequent type of attitude and position affect as the least deployed evaluative resource, which reflects the writers’ prioritizing of evaluations of discipline-related things to project an objective-like positioning; 3) Realizations of judgement throughout the corpus are mainly invoked, signaling the adoption of particular evaluation strategies around human or human-like triggers; 4) Basic essays feature greater use of attitudinal resources than intermediate and advanced essays, suggesting a progressive development of objective-like writing dynamics; 5) Overall, high-graded essays display more frequent expressions of attitude than middle- and low-graded essays, suggesting that the expression of attitude is not simply reduced in learners’ discourse as they move forward in their academic training, but according to conventions that favor certain types of strategic attitudinal positioning in texts; 6) In general, the realizational variables of attitude category, explicitness and trigger selection show significantly matching tendencies in high-graded essays in the basic, intermediate and advanced sub-corpora, confirming the central role of the strategic use of affect, judgement and appreciation resources in terms of their realizational variables in the production of effective texts, even when writing conventions develop towards reduced proportions of attitude. Those findings which were not found to be statistically significant might need further exploration, perhaps on the basis of a larger corpus, in order to refine their implications from a statistical perspective. Still, it is worth remembering statistical interpretations, either descriptive or inferential, always leave room for open possibilities.

Regarding the latter point, interpretations of the reported results need to take into consideration that a relevant limitation of this study is the size of its corpus. Although the results of the analysis demonstrate consistent and mostly statistically significant features, their full implications apply to the context of the academic community where the essays were collected. In order to obtain more generalizable findings with more predictive potential in relation to the Mexican context, future work might need to replicate the study on the basis of a larger and more varied corpus.

While the scope of the results of this work is limited to the boundaries of the context of this research, the implications of its findings represent meaningful contributions that complement previous research on the workings of appraisal resources of attitude in EFL academic writing. Most importantly, this work contributes to further understanding of the workings of evaluative language in academic instruction in the context of Mexico, where pedagogical developments from the systemic functional perspective of appraisal theory are still in their early stages. It is ideal that the focus of future work seek to implement research findings in the development of concrete instructional tools which improve the scenario of effective interpersonal positioning for undergraduate authors seeking to take part in international disciplinary dialogue through academic English.