Expression of Epistemic Stance in EFL Chinese University Students’ Writing

This paper reported findings on a contrastive analysis of epistemic expressions in argumentative essays between NS and NNS Chinese L2 writers. Based on an examination of a NS corpus and a NNS learner corpus across four proficiency levels, the study shows there is great similarity in the total number of epistemic devices used per thousand words between the NS and NNS university students’ written texts. However, the NNS were found to use a...