Evidentiality in Argumentative Essays by Upper-Intermediate EFL Students

The article presents a study that aims at casting light on evidentiality in a corpus of argumentative essays written by a group of upper-intermediate university students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) whose first language is Norwegian (henceforth – participants). The corpus of the participants’ essays was examined for the markers of evidentiality, which was operationalised as the source of textual information that originated outside the current text (Hyland, 2005). Specifically, the corpus was searched for reporting verbs associated with evidentiality (for instance, to indicate, to posit, to show, etc.). The results of the corpus analysis indicated that the participants’ argumentative essays appeared to be marked by such verbs associated with evidentiality as to argue, to claim, to say and to state. These findings were discussed in the article through the lens of didactic considerations that would be relevant to tertiary EFL contexts.