A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF INTERPERSONAL APPRAISAL RESOURCESIN PAKISTANI ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS

Abstract

Argumentative writing skills encourage English Language Learners to generate, assess, and comprehend academic and professional discourse (Martin, 1989; Crammond, 1998). Realizing the importance of persuasive language, the present research aimed to analyze the appraisal language choices concerning the argumentative essays written by Pakistani undergraduate students. The argumentative genre model presented by Martin and Rose (2008)and appraisal theory proposed by Martin and Rose (2005)were, respectively, applied to fifty Pakistani argumentative essays retrieved from the International Corpus of Learners English (ICLE). The reason behind using two frameworks was to explore the uses of appraisal language choices according to each phase of the Pakistani argumentative essay. The results demonstrate that most undergraduate Pakistani English Learners inappropriately deployed appraisal language choices that undermined the persuasiveness of the student writers’ arguments. Hence, the pedagogical implications of this study will help the English language teachers and learners in explicitly utilizing the evaluative writing skills that are central to persuasive written text.