Interaction in Academic discourse: Communicative strategies forthe expression of stance

In the last two decades academic discourse has come to be seen as a purposeful interaction between writers and readers in which the writers try to construct a credible representation of themselves and their research and to align themselves with the discourse community by evaluating their own work and views and the work and views of others. The study of stance in academic writing has concentrated primarily on showing differences in the preferences of academic communities by discipline. This paper seeks to examine differences in the expression of stance in academic English in the writing habits of novice Czech writers and expert native writers on the basis of an analysis of the use of certain hedges and boosters in published research articles and unpublished undergraduate and graduate dissertations.