STANCE MARKERS: AN UNDERDEVELOPED ASPECT OF SERBIAN EFL WRITERS’ COMPETENCE

Abstract

The topic of the current study is the interactional dimension of metadiscourse, as expressed through lexico-grammatical devices in beginner L2 writing of L1 Serbian/L2 English learners. The participants’ use of metadiscourse devices was chosen due to its particular relevance for the beginner L2 writing process at the tertiary level. The sample of participants included a total of 70 English language majors attending the University of Niš. The corpus consisted of the students’ expository paragraphs collected over a period of nine weeks during the 2019/2020 schoolyear. The taxonomy used in this particular study was that of Biber (2006) and Min et al. (2019), with a particular focus of hedges, stance adjectives, stance adverbs, and stance verbs. The results obtained imply that stance markers deserve a more prominent place in the EFL classroom.