A Corpus-based Analysis of Stance in the Japanese Medical Students’ Essays
The aim of this paper is to analyze essays written by Japanese medical students with
regard to the epistemic comments, or stance, by means of corpus-based quantitative and
qualitative analysis. More specifically, this paper underlines the importance of developing
student genre awareness regarding rhetorical skills so that they can carry out the
communicative requirements found in academic settings such as medical writing in the
future.
It is generally accepted that a major problem for academic essay writing in EFL is to
convey statements with an appropriate degree of doubt or certainty. Such evaluative
comments are crucial in academic writing, although novice writers often find it difficult to
distinguish opinion from fact and to deal with expressing evaluative assertions in acceptable
and persuasive ways (Hyland & Milton 1997). Many studies have also shown that direct and
unqualified writing is more typical in EFL writing than with native speakers (Skelton 1988,
Bloor and Bloor 1991).
For instance, Japanese medical students are unlikely to use modifiers as epistemic
modals, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and are more likely to employ direct statements,
which often leads to a misunderstanding of the writers’ commitment to fact. This paper will
discuss the results of contrastive corpus data of students’ essays and Medcorpus, which is
comprised of scientific articles in medicine, and explore how familiarizing students with
patterns of epistemic expressions can be beneficial in raising student genre awareness.
Yokoyama Shoko, Japan
Submission date: 29 -06-08
yokoyama@med.miyazaki-u.ac.jp
CVs
(Name) Shozo YOKOYAMA (Mr.)
(Affiliation) Associate Professor
University of Miyazaki, Faculty of Medicine
(Office Address) 5200 Kihara, Kiyotake, Miyazaki-gun, Miyazaki-ken 889-1692, JAPAN
(Office Phone & Fax) +81-985-85-3595+
(Home) 3-46, Gion, Miyazaki-shi, Miyazaki-ken 880-0024, JAPAN
(Home Phone & Fax) +81-985-25-5501+
(E-mail) yokoyama@med.miyazaki-u.ac.jp
Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Miyazaki, he holds a BA and
Master’s degree in linguistics from the Kumamoto University in Japan. He is currently working
on PhD thesis in corpus analysis of EMP (English for Medical Purposes) and genre analysis.
He taught at the Civil Aviation College in Japan (1990-2002) and co-authored aviation English
materials with National French Civil Aviation College. He has taught on the Master’s in
Education in Japanese Language, being involved in the EMP programme.
He has been a working committee member of Japan Association College English Teachers
since 2004, and a project leader of corpus-based medical English analysis funded by
Grant-in-Aid by Japanese Ministry of Education since 2005. He has participated several
international conferences in Japan and abroad, including as a plenary speaker at PKETA
International Conference (2007). His research interests include meta-discourse and writing in
EAP and EMP.