Stance-taking: reporting verbs in EFL undergraduate theses

reporting verbs in citations in EFL undergraduate theses

Abstract

This article explores the use of stance-taking in reporting verbs in undergraduate theses written by Mexican students in English as a Foreign Language. The corpus consists of thirty undergraduate theses written by non-native speakers of English in the area of English Language Teaching. I follow a discourse analysis approach using corpus linguistic tools. The findings show that undergraduates use reporting verbs to express their stance in their theses and that this varies according to chapter within a thesis. This paper suggests a category of reporting verbs that is commonly used in EFL academic writing within the ELT discipline.