Authorial Stance-Taking and Engagement by Iranian PhD Candidates of TEFL in Writing Their Dissertations

Writing has a special role in academic society as most of the information is transferred though publications. It has various aspects and among them stance taking and engagement have received less attention. The current study aimed at investigating how Iranian PhD candidates take stance and engagement in their dissertations. The participants of the study included Iranian PhD candidates and corpus for text analysis contained PhD dissertations written by them. Discourse analysis was carried out on the corpus to identify stance taking and engagement based on the framework proposed by Hyland (2008). Overall, it was found that Iranian PhD candidates use all the elements of stance taking although some elements were more present than others. For instance, the use of stance makers of boosters like actually, believe(s), believed, certain, clear, definite, demonstrate(s), demonstrated, and establish were present in the dissertations about 12.38% while the use of self-mention like I, me, my, our, us, we, the researcher, and the researchers were present about 39.04% out of all instances of stance markers used by the PhD candidates. With regard to the engagement, it was found that all the engagement markers were present in the dissertation except engagement markers such as Questions and Directive (imperative). As in stance taking the elements of engagement were present with various degrees. For instance, the use of interjections like the use of word Key was 12.42% while that of modals such as have to, must, need, ought, and should was 59.62%. The results were discussed and their implications were presented.