Getting engaged: dialogistic positioning in novice academic discussion writing

This chapter builds on a proposal put forward in Swain (2007a), that in effective academic argumentation, a very important role is played by the engageMent system (White, 1998, 2003; Martin & White, 2005) of appraisal theory (Feez et al, 2008; Martin, 2000; White, 2005; Martin & White, 2005). Applications of appraisal theory in educational contexts thus far have tended to focus on the systems of attitude (Coffin, 2002, 2003; Rothery & Stenglin, 2000; Hood, 2004) and graduation (Hood, 2006). My analysis for attitude and engagement of discussion essays by non-native speaker undergraduates suggested that students of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) may experience less difficulty with effective deployment of the resources of attitude than with those of dialogistic positioning. From this it followed that increased attention to and awareness of the latter’s forms and functions could prove beneficial in EAP contexts. Here I report on a subsequent quantitative and qualitative analysis for engagement and attitude of a small corpus of non-native English speaker (NNS) undergraduate discussion essays, first presented at the ISFLC in Odense (Swain, 2007b). The chapter is organised into 7 sections. The next section 2 sets out some reasons for attending to engagement in academic discussion writing. Section 3 explains the engageMent system in more detail. Section 4 anticipates some difGetting engaged: dialogistic positioning in novice academic discussion writing