In Sections I and II of this book, we considered general issues regarding

Stance and evaluation
Although you may think of academic discourse as being objective and neu-
tral, its key purpose is to persuade the audience that the work reported is 
valid and reliable. In support of this claim, a large body of research has 

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100 Teaching and assessing EAP
shown the widespread use of evaluative language in academic texts. Stance 
or evaluation can be defined as the expression of the writer/speaker’s atti-
tudes, opinions, judgements or feelings. Students may be most concerned 
about whether to use I, we or a passive form, but stance is expressed 
through many lexical and grammatical means, including adverbials (unfor-
tunately), clauses (it is surprising that), modal verb forms (should) and noun- 
preposition phrases (the evidence of).
In earlier sections, we saw that stance varies according to mode (Biber, 
2006) and discipline (Hyland, 2001); it also varies according to genre, as 
Harwood (2005b) shows in computer science. He found that the use of I 
was rare in RAs but widespread in master’s dissertations, where its purpose 
was to impress the examiner by portraying the writer as a careful researcher. 
Indeed, when students underuse personal pronouns, especially for impor-
tant functions such as making claims, their texts can lack credibility and 
authority (Hyland, 2002). Thus in making decisions on personal pronoun 
use, students need to consider not just disciplinary and genre usage, but also 
the function of the pronoun in the text.
Another stance feature that may cause difficulty for learners is hedging. 
A hedge is a word or phrase that lessens the impact of a statement. Its use 
allows authors to modify their commitment to what they say, as seen in the 
example below (hedge in bold).
The reason for this is not clear. It 
could result from local variations . . .
Hedging allows authors to present information even under conditions of 
uncertainty and offers some protection from being attacked. In the example 
above, the hedge could makes it more difficult to criticize the explanation 
because the author has not signalled full commitment to its truth. Hedging is 
also used for politeness reasons because the reduction in commitment has the 
effect of softening the author’s statement. Making a new claim is always poten-
tially threatening to others in the field, since it may run counter to other work 
or established views. In these circumstances, hedging not only shows modesty 
regarding the author’s own work but also makes criticisms of other researchers 
more acceptable within the field. This is particularly important for learners, 
who may be urged to be critical but may feel uncertain about challenging more 
experienced researchers. The following example shows the use of the hedge 
may well to soften criticism of a measure suggested by an earlier researcher. 
The criticism (too strict) would be much stronger without the hedge.
Russell (2009) suggests a measure for important cases. . . . It