Resumo
Expressing claims with an adequate degree of certainty and uncertainty is one of the major setbacks for foreign language students writing academic essays in English. In order to differentiate beliefs from facts and evaluate statements in satisfactory and persuasive ways authors have to make use of epistemic comments which exert a crucial role in academic writing. However, regardless of its significance, little is known about how foreign language learners present their claims in their writing. This article compares exponents of doubt and certainty in the essays of 67 Brazilian speaking university students writing in English with those of 52 British and American learners of similar age and educational level in a corpus of about 68,000 words. A meticulous analysis of the essays reveals that the Brazilian writers deviate considerably from their native speaker counterparts in employing a more restricted variety of items, being much more assertive in relation to their propositions and demonstrating greater difficulties in transmitting an exact degree of assurance. This paper stresses a number of issues raised by the study and makes some pedagogical recommendations for developing skills in this central pragmatic area.O periódico Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada utiliza a licença do Creative Commons (CC), preservando assim, a integridade dos artigos em ambiente de acesso aberto, em que:
- A publicação se reserva o direito de efetuar, nos originais, alterações de ordem normativa, ortográfica e gramatical, com vistas a manter o padrão culto da língua, respeitando, porém, o estilo dos autores;
- Os originais não serão devolvidos aos autores;
- Os autores mantêm os direitos totais sobre seus trabalhos publicados na Trabalhos de Linguística Aplicada, ficando sua reimpressão total ou parcial, depósito ou republicação sujeita à indicação de primeira publicação na revista, por meio da licença CC-BY;
- Deve ser consignada a fonte de publicação original;
- As opiniões emitidas pelos autores dos artigos são de sua exclusiva responsabilidade.
Downloads
Não há dados estatísticos.
