Abstract

At tertiary institutions, undergraduate students are required to possess academic language features to express their stance in argumentative writing. However, the L2 undergraduate students lack competency in employing various grammatical structures to construct stance. They tend to use repetitive and similar structures in their writing. With the aim to gain more insights into patterns of use of grammatical structures in L2 academic writing, this study analysed the distributional patterns of use of grammatical structures in 100 argumentative essays by the L2 first-year undergraduate students in a private university in Malaysia. An adapted framework of grammatical patterns by Işık-Taş (2018) that comprised three main categories namely noun complement structures, deictic expression and other structures, was used to analyse the data. The results generally revealed that noun complement structures, deictic expressions and other structures can be used by the undergraduate students to express stance in L2 argumentative essays. The results showed that the L2 first-year undergraduate students tend to use noun complement structures such as N-to and deictic expressions such as this-N in their argumentative essays. However, the students rarely used other structures such as N-wh, N-be-to and N-be-that. Understanding the students’ patterns of use of prevalent grammatical structures is fundamental for L2 language instructors and can be used as insights for material development and design of classroom activities in the teaching and learning of specific language features used in L2 academic writing.