Learning to Navigate Evaluative Meanings in English Academic Writing

Academic authors use various evaluative resources to express personal attitudes, opinions, emotions, or stances to persuade readers to accept their epistemic claims. However, expressing evaluation appropriately and effectively in English academic writing poses a significant challenge for L2 novice academic writers. This book is specifically designed to address this challenge for novice writers. It first explicates the notion of authorial evaluation in academic writing and sorts out major approaches to evaluation in Applied English Linguistics in the past three decades, foregrounding the advantages of the appraisal approach. The book then presents an integrated analysis combining a move analysis based on Kwan's (2006) generic model of literature review with an appraisal analysis applying Martin and White's (2005) appraisal taxonomy on Chinese novice writers' evaluation in MA thesis literature reviews. General features and problematic issues of the novice writers' demonstration of evaluation in English academic writing are identified and discussed, and a teaching model for explicit instruction on evaluation in English academic writing is proposed in the book with the aim to enhance novice writers' ability to express evaluation in academic writing. An enriched appraisal taxonomy is also proposed to promote the applicability of the appraisal framework in academic discourse.