Stance-taking in Narrative Completion: Attitude Resources in Chinese EFL Students’ Continuation Writing

Abstract

Stance-taking poses a significant challenge for writers, especially for those writing in English as a foreign language. To explore the realization and patterning of stance resources in EFL writing, this study investigates English continuation writing, a narrative-like school task, through the lens of the attitude system within the Appraisal framework. Adopting a corpus-assisted comparative design, the study analyzes 99 continuation texts produced under two topics, Homesickness and Alligator Race, focusing on affect, judgment, appreciation, and their inscribed and invoked realizations. Results indicate that topic is the strongest factor affecting attitude distribution: Homesickness elicits more affect, whereas Alligator Race elicits more judgment. Besides, disciplinary background mainly affects appreciation and the use of invoked attitude, and its effect on appreciation depends on the writer’s disciplinary background, that is, science students use more invoked resources, especially affording. Finally, essay rating is significantly related to affect and invoked attitude: low-rated essays use fewer affect resources and fewer invoked attitude resources. The study extends the application of the Appraisal framework to narrative-like school writing and has implications for genre-sensitive writing instruction in senior high school English classrooms.