Authorial stance and rhetorical structure in English research articles in tourism: a comparative study of international and national Thai journals

Abstract

This study is a comparative analysis of the authorial stance in English language research articles, written in L2, by Thai researchers and published in Thai journals, with those published in international journals in terms of rhetorical structure and linguistic devices used to express authorial stance. The corpus consisted of 50 articles from international journals and 50 from Thai journals, in the research interest of Tourism, utilizing Swales’ (2004) and Pho’s (2013), Move analysis of a 23-Move structure from Abstract to Discussion-Conclusion. The findings revealed a greater number of Moves and steps occur in international articles than in Thai articles. Based on Hyland’s (2005a) interactional metadiscourse framework, hedges are the most common device used by both groups of writers to express their stances. When comparing both groups of texts, hedges and self-mentions are more common in international articles whereas boosters and attitude markers are more common in Thai articles. There are statistically significant differences between texts in the number of occurrences of all four types of stance markers. The differences in the use of Moves and stance markers between the two groups may be attributed to reader types (national and international), competition in the discourse community, and socio-cultural aspects. This is an area worthy of further research. The findings have both practical and pedagogical implications for academic writing, especially writing for publication.