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This presentation discusses the challenges students face in expressing their thoughts and findings while representing the ideas of others in their academic work. It also explores the concept of stance neutrality as a resource and questions the current approach to teaching stance in English for Academic Purposes (EAP).
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Teaching stance: is our approach too simplistic? Jenifer Spencer
SLIDE 2: Students and Stance • EAP teachers put a lot of effort into areas of language relating to argument, stance and citation, seeing them as at the top of the Knowledge Transformation hierarchy and as the desirable output of EAP. • Yet when we see students’ course work on their subject courses or their research writing, we find this teaching is not effectively reflected. • Students constantly struggle with the effort to represent the thoughts and findings of others in a framework of their own ideas and position.
SLIDE 3: Students’ expressions of stance • They are often either unaware that they are expressing an evaluative stance • Mann and Lu (2014), claim older employees are choosing to work past 60 and even 70 years of age. This results in Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennial cohorts will be working alongside each other for another decade or more. • Sulio, Zu and Michel (2013), in their study on furniture arrangement in apartment-type housing declared that “occupants would give a great deal of time and effort to organise the living room furniture depending on their personal tastes, needs and priorities”. • ... or try to do it in an inappropriate way. • The concept of display, status and interaction allow us to knock Gulstein’s approach to social interaction. • This thesis will help managers to manage risks more effectively.
SLIDE 4 Students’ expressions of stance • Stetch et al. (2016) found that the pH indicated the rate of dissolution; however they completely ignored the effect of the interaction between the oil molecules and the surfactants in the water. • Student: I didn’t mean to be critical of the authors • Willful voluntary (ignored/ neglected/ failed to/omitted/ overlooked/ did not take into account / pointed out that they had not included)
SLIDE 5 Stance neutrality as a resource • In fact the ability to show neutrality can be part of the strategic process of withholding judgement on the work. (Sawaki, 2014 Lancaster, 2016) • Opens up space for evaluation and explains that it also gives space to allow for readers’ possible reactions.InHyland (1999) nearly 80% of reporting verbs in research articles in were non-factive, i.e. do not reveal the writer’s stance (e.g. found, concluded, observed, argue). • This may be even more important in student genres as they are expected to include their research journey in the narrative of the text, to evidence their academic practices are sound. • “A concrete stance exhausts the flexibility of the external voices” (Sawaki p 87)
SLIDE 6: Definitions • WHAT IS STANCE? • Your personal opinion • A verb • Stance can be expressed to different extents by using value laden word choice, grammatical devices and paralinguistic devices. (Biber, 2006) But this is stance being expressed, not stance being formed and established. Stance doesn’t come in to being at the moment of being expressed, in the way that a promise does. • My rough definition: Having a position which is based on a balance of evidence and argument which you are prepared to express and defend. This points to a problem with the way stance seems to be approached in EAP pedagogy, terms of its expression rather than its development and the journey to where we stand.....
SLIDE 7: THE STAMPEDE TO STANCE • Artificial stance-seeking tasks • Pedagogic EAP tasks often encourage students to write on subjects on which they are more likely to have a pre-formed opinion (e.g. capital punishment). • They are sometimes taught on the model of informal social argument- • Protagonists’ initial stance is based on life experience, speculation, hypothesising, often underpinned by personal disposition). The arguments are simply marshalled to support their initial stance. • “They looked for texts that supported their opinion”- not texts that answered a question. Some even reported that they changed their topic if they couldn’t find sources to support their opinion! (Thomson et al., 2013) • These students are not using texts to obtain knowledge they are using them to complete an assignment • Students are given ‘stance in advance tasks’ and yet research is about answering a question, with the researcher’s stance emerging during the process.
Slide 8: Academic assignments • Compare this with some typical academic assignments: • PhD • Decide Question Develop Stance Report • UG Assignments • Given question Develop Stance Report (and possibly reading) Case studies/ (data/practices: What should this company do? What did they do wrong?) Causal outcomes or interpretation ( two substances are put together X happens. Explain why/ Or what happens/or how can we avoid it?)
SLIDE 9: The Stampede to Stance In academic work, we are expected to identify problems and come up with solutions. Even in low level tasks, you are not expected to come up with the solution first, but to analyse the problem and then present solutions. • This ‘stampede to stance’ in some English teaching classrooms may be reinforced by the fact that texts sometimes do start with an expression of stance, something that the writer intends to bring evidence to establish. In that case it might LOOK as if stance came first...However this is just a writing device. • They have come to this position through a long period of study and development of ideas and knowledge. • To express stance you have to understand and experience the process of developing a stance. • This may be obscured by the classroom focus on...
Slide 11: Behind the veil • Pedagogic texts and tasks present language as tools/ devices/and teachers talk about ‘equipping student’s with toolkits.... but... • You don’t go to the hardware shop to buy a tool before you know what job needs to be done and what sort of tools you need. This leads to students ... • using a lot of sledgehammers to crack nuts. • We need to help students to look behind the veil. • Before they are ready to construct a text and tackle interaction with readers, students need to spend time behind the veil.
SLIDE 12: The E word • Stance is an epistemological issue. • If language is not tied to epistemology when it is learned, expressing stance becomes impossible. • Epistemology in an academic context is often a matter of asking • What did they do? • In what circumstances? • What did they find? • What did they conclude? • How do these findings/ conclusions interact with those of other scholars? With the theory? With my own findings and conclusions? • This is a long way from references to students ‘attempts to learn paraphrasing.’ (Hirvala and Du, 2013).
SLIDE 14: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL JOURNEY. • Stance is a staging point on an epistemological journey. • Acquiring enough knowledge and being comfortable with that knowledge to progress to the next stage. • Understanding of the next stage gained from others. • Doing your own research and evaluating it against that of others (including evaluating your own findings by the same critical standards). • Then have to package and encapsulate this journey into the expression of this stance. Stance is like a hard diamond compressed from all these heavy rocks gathered on the way. • (And the mountain of knowledge is eroding and depositing and shifting like tectonic plates all the way through!!)
Slide 15: Steps and stages • Knowledge telling vs Knowledge transforming is presented as a an opposition, where one is bad and the other desirable. • In fact there is a spectrum ... the intermediate steps are also desirable at the appropriate point. • KNOWLEDGE RETAILING –building / securing it/ consolidating • KNOWEDGE SHARING – the stage when we decide what we really know- feel secure in it, so can share it with others. Also the stage at which we start to be audience aware- telling people what they want to know, being selective, expressing our degree of certainty. • Knowledge Synthesising: Synthesising theories with evidence, selecting, integrating, challenging or rejecting the interpretations of others.
SLIDE 16: Back to the language • Student’s problem: • Trying to get first journal article accepted. Two reviewers were perfectly happy; reviewer three was not. The student did more experiments to meet the initial criticisms. Still it was rejected. “How can I persuade Mr Picky to accept this?” I suggested more hedging. • We consciously plant the hedge and trim it to the correct height. Self-imposed limit. • Student said I want to understand this concept properly – I want to understand this clearly. I need to know the Arabic concept for this. He consulted a dictionary and he said...
SLIDE 18: The Torque • THE TORQUE is voluntarily ‘worn’ by the writer in academic texts. Here is an example of a STEM student’s PhD. • Torque: Being nice to other researchers- moderating and depersonalising: • It is one of the weaknesses of the Einstein Theory of relativity that although it furnishes field equations it does not provide boundary conditions for them. • Draw boundaries: • The above result would seem to indicate that this is probably not the case, as our universe is almost certainly asymptotically flat, although it may be .... • It is shown that singularity is inevitable, provided that certain conditions are met. • (Stephen Hawking PhD)
SLIDE 19: An SFL perspective on stance • “Whenever speakers assert their propositions they put them up for agreement or disagreement by their hearers. • In any discussion, argument or quarrel, it is the content of the mood block that is at stake. This includes the subject, the finite and whether the proposition is positive or negative . When speakers are definite about their propositions, the finite encodes the information about whether an event has occurred, is presently occurring or is yet to occur [presumably this also applies to whether a state or phenomenon exists]. • We use the term modality to refer to all positioning by speakers about probability, usuality, typicality, obviousness, obligation and inclination.” (Butt et al., 2012)
Academic stance • “All the of these adjuncts weaken speaker’s propositions.” • This is where I part company: No they hedge them (make them more secure). • Is hedging really weakening? No it is specifying, constraining, drawing clear limits round what you can say. It doesn’t mean you are not sure about what you are saying, it means you are sure about what you can and can’t say. • That is what stance is.
SLIDE 21: What is academic stance? • Academic stance: • Is it • I want people to agree with me? • That is what politicians/ campaigners and advertisers want. • I want to say only what I know to be true. • Academics (should) want what they say to be true and know that they have made every effort to make it so.
Thankyou jenifer.spencer1@btinternet.com
