comparison of stance markers in iranian tefl students' ma and phd theses

In recent years, there has been an interest into research on students’ writing as how they express themselves and their personal feelings in the text. the purpose of this corpus-based study is to investigate how the use of stance expressions developed in the academic writing of iranian tefl ma students to phd level, and to compare them with native english phd theses. to this end, 35 iranian ma theses and 35 iranian phd dissertations in tefl were randomly selected from those published by state universities in iran and were indexed in iranian research institute for information science and technology (irandoc). moreover, as a baseline data, 35 phd theses in tefl written by native english students were randomly selected from online databases. the corpora were then analyzed based on hyland’s (2005) taxonomy of stance expressions of hedges, boosters, self-mention and attitude markers. the data were analyzed both by means of antconc software. the findings were then compared per 50,000 words between the three dataset. results indicated that native english students used significantly more number of stance expressions than iranian ma and phd students. moreover, except for boosters, results of chi-square test showed that there were statistically significant differences in the use of hedges, attitude markers and self-mention between iranian ma and phd corpus. in other words, a modest development has been observed for iranian authors from their ma into their phd level. the results of this study can benefit both novice researchers and graduate students.