Attitude markers in upper secondary pupil essays across educational contexts and genres

The concept of interactional metadiscourse, which refers to linguistic resources that writers use to express their opinions and interact with their readers, has been a subject of growing interest in recent research on written communication. While many metadiscourse-related studies have focused on professional-level genres, few have analysed features of pre-tertiary writing. Furthermore, attitude markers, words that offer the author’s affective evaluation, constitute a category of metadiscourse that arguably remains undertheorized. This study thus aims to investigate the types of attitude markers that upper secondary pupils rely on, and how the use of these types varies across educational contexts and genres. To address these aims, I collected and analysed a corpus comprising of 135 essays belonging to five genres written at Norwegian, Swedish and British schools. In total, 216 attitude marker types belonging to four sub-categories were identified. The frequencies of these sub-categories were then compared across educational contexts and genres. In contrast to previous studies, pupils in all three educational contexts offered their personal evaluations more frequently and with a greater range of types than would be expected in professional genres. The results also indicated that the pupils varied their use of attitude markers according to the purposes of the target genre. These findings may be relevant for guiding novice writers to adapt their expression of attitude to the communicative context.