Literature Review Stage
Literature review, of Review of Literature, does not only function as a review, with summarising, paraphrasing and quoting, of all the previous works read by the author of the current study, but also as an evaluation of the literature by finding support and evidence from the previous works and identifying the gap between previous research works and the current study which offers solutions and further claims its significance in the related research area to align with the readership.
Because of its change of the rhetorical functions with more summary of the other research, although evaluation is still significant and necessary, the attitudinal density at the Literature Review stage is lower than the Introduction stage.
Effective student writers are able to manipulate both positive and negative evaluative lexis in order to construct "high order meaning complexes" (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p.286), directing readers to align with the writers' attitudinal orientation or stance. The following table illustrates the polarity of attitudinal values at the Literature Review stage:
| Positive attitude | Negative attitude |
correct, useful, effective, coherent, help, essential, important, positive, support, enable, opportunities, opportunities, insight, encourage, encouragement, relevant, appropriate, improvement, good, beneficial, interest, successful, key, central, reinforcement, sufficient, significant, clear |
mistakes, misuse, difficulties, limitation, disappointingly, erroneous, incoherence, ambiguous, stress, constraints, complicated, negative, low, incorrect, complex, blocks, problems, disadvantaged |
Most of the attitudinal resources represented in the LR stage are Appreciation, mainly assessing the significance of the pedagogic approaches mentioned in previous works and students’ performance in production of learning outcomes. Meanwhile, description of scholars, teacher and student participants (facilitator [+jud], professional [+jud] writers, amateur [-jud] writers, expert [+jud], novice [-jud] speaker) and their effort are represented with Judgement values. Only three instances of Affect resources are deployed at this stage according to the corpus for construing students’ emotional responses and feelings. Below are some of the examples of the attitudinal resources deployed at this stage:
| (a) | Such approach is effective [+app] to enable [+app] students to grasp fundamental facts and sequences [+jud] in the context of exam question. |
| (b) | Positive reinforcement [+app] can always help students to build up their self-confidence [+jud] and provide them motivation [+jud] to make progress [+jud] and achieve an academic goal [+jud]. |
| (c) | Teachers can work with individual learners to reduce the anxiety [-aff] of learners. |
| (d) | The writer does not need to worry [+aff] if his writing contains grammatical mistakes or incoherence. |
Effective literature reviews demonstrate the writers’ ability to postulate attitudinal values to seek support or critique the limitation of the previous research works, in other words, to “position readers to adopt particular attitudes to characters in the course of an unfolding narrative” (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 286). Such interplay of positive and negative values contributes to the realisation of a research warrant for the writers’ own study.