Abstract:

It is a well-known fact that research articles cannot be considered as an objective description of an investigation, in fact, they should be persuasive because the writers are required to change the minds of other members in the scientific field. Thus, academic writers use stance devices to be able to build a persuasive argument, to reflect ideational content and to form authorial self, specifically while writing effective abstracts. Therefore, the present study showed an attempt to shed some light on stance device employment by examining stance devices defined in Hyland’s (2005) framework. The data for this study were 60 research articles in the journal, Social Behavior and Personality, an internationally published refereed journal. 30 articles published by native English-speaking academic writers (NW) and 30 articles by non-native English- speaking academic writers (Turkish academic writers, NNW) supplied the data. The texts were converted to an electronic corpus of 7196 words and searched for the stance devices in the 60 articles of the study by the corpus analysis tool AntConc (Anthony, 2011) by using the move model suggested by Swales (1990). The findings of the study revealed that there were both differences and similarities between the use of stance devices by native and non-native English- speaking academic writers. The outcomes also showed that writer stance seemed to be closely related with the discourse community, text types of that community, the global and local features, cultural/educational background of the writer, English language proficiency level of the writer, and the writer's personality and/or style.

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