Evaluation in moderation: Evaluative adjectives in student academic presentations

Abstract

Evaluation is inherent in academic discourse and fundamental to shaping college students’ critical thinking and ability to assess the status of discipline-specific information. The current study focused on the use of evaluative adjectives in native English speaking (L1) and English as a second language (L2) college student academic presentations (N = 40). The goal was to find out how the two groups of presenters compared on their frequency, referential choices, variability of evaluative adjectives, patterns of adjectival structures, and level of sophistication of the adjectives they used and also to identify common trends for both groups along the categories. The findings revealed that, even though the two groups shared some common patterns in their use of evaluative adjectives across the various categories, the L2 presenters most notably differed in the frequency and the much smaller range of adjectives with which the common patterns were realized. The findings of the study are discussed in light of their language learning and teaching implications.