The Comparison of Evaluative That Clauses in Turkish L2 Novice and Expert Writers' Abstracts

Abstract

How authors adopt a stance and connect with their readers has gotten a lot of attention in the literature and is now a significant part of many ESP courses. What Hyland and Tse (2005b) call ‘evaluative that’ is a primarily underappreciated interpersonal trait. By placing a complement clause within a superordinate sentence, this form allows authors to build authorial stance and explicitly evaluate their own or others' work. It is an important way of giving authorial feedback and assessment when comparing the use of the structure in student and expert abstracts in applied linguistics. The current work explores two corpora comprising 40 abstracts from masters theses and dissertations by Turkish L2 graduate students in the U.S., and 70 abstracts by published research studies in two applied linguistics journals. It was discovered that evaluative that is less commonly used in these abstracts by the novice Turkish L2 graduate students than the published scholars. Although both groups used the structure similarly to a large extent, novice writers presented some peculiar traits concerning the specific uses of the structure. The results of the study give hints about the authorial voice of the expert and L2 novice writers by looking at what writers decided to assess, the viewpoints they adopted, the source they ascribed the stance to, and how they presented their judgments.