Chapter 6: Evaluative Expressions in Persuasive Essays by L2 Learners of Japanese

Language is used to accomplish various purposes in a wide range of social contexts. One of the most common purposes of language use is to persuade others in a variety of social settings, such as advertising, politics, debate, and so on. For the academic context, students are likely to work on persuasive writing to convince the reader of a stated opinion or belief. In order to successfully complete persuasive writing, writers need to not just describe facts, but also express their own opinions, feelings, attitudes, and perceptions while keeping in mind readers’ expectations. Hyland (2010) noted that such interactivity of the language is expressed using linguistic resources, such as evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2000), appraisal (Martin & Rose, 2007; Martin & White, 2005), and stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989; Hyland, 2010). Previous studies suggest that control of evaluative resources as interpersonal language is essential in constructing a critical voice and building persuasion in essays (Liu, 2013), but this topic has been largely ignored in foreign language writing. Therefore, the present study examines how FL writers use evaluative resources to express themselves in their persuasive essays compared to native speakers, and how FL writers’ language proficiency affects their usage of resources.