Building on previous studies that suggest notable differences between levels of writing and disciplines, this study investigates stance devices across two parameters: disciplinary differences and academic level of the writer. It investigates disciplinary differences in terms of writer-reader interactions in the domain of academic writing and how disciplinary communities employ stance markers in research articles. This study also examines what strategies student writers and academics employ in terms of identity within their own writing and how these writers convey their ideas and present themselves. Based on a corpus of 39 academic research articles, this comparative study, following Hyland\u27s (2005a) framework, explores whether four categories of stance features (hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mentions) show any similarities and differences across the disciplines of Civil Engineering and Applied Linguistics and student and expert writing. The results showed that student writing featured more stance markers than those written by academics, although the differences were small. Moreover, the results revealed cross-disciplinary differences in terms of the frequency of stance markers. The Applied Linguistics research articles contained more stance markers than those in Civil Engineering with a large discrepancy particularly in the use of self-mentions. Findings from this research may help inform student writers and writing instructors about the use of stance markers in academic research articles and help particularly students promote their way of presenting their opinions and themselves in the text.
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