Exploring appraisal in claims of student writers in argumentative essays

Abstract

This paper presents some exploratory observations on appraisal in a set of 40 undergraduate students’ argumentative essays. Written texts can be seen to embody, initiate, or simulate various kinds of interpersonal and textual interaction, working together with ideation, as their writers develop and evaluate arguments for reader consideration. In our ongoing research, we investigate the linguistic resources on which undergraduate writers draw for this complex set of intellectual and dialogic purposes. In this paper, we concentrate on the evaluative wording of claims in an English language essay as captured within the framework of appraisal theory (Martin 2000; White 2002). We focus on how student writers convey, and sometimes negotiate, evaluative meanings in claims that they make. Evaluative linguistic choices made by writers of high-rated and lowrated essays appear quite similar in the general incidence of appraisal system resources. At a finer level of analysis, different trends begin to emerge regarding the types of ENGAGEMENT resources used and their combination with GRADUATION and ATTITUDINAL resources in writers’ claims. We briefly consider implications for research and pedagogy.

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