Methodology and Participants Stage functions as the genre of a procedural report, aiming to recording the sequence of events as research processes in detail with accuracy and the description of the participants such as gender, age and ethnographic groups, education background, etc. General objectivity shall be achieved, but evaluative language is recorded albeit the lowest among all stages as observation on the course of the research and the general statements with evaluation are included at this stage.

As Appreciation resources dominate the MP section, most of the appreciation values address the incorrectness observed in students’ works, or the difficulties students are facing on the course of the observation, with solutions offered in the approaches to counter the problems.

Judgement values are mainly present in the Participant part, coding the participants’ education background, or capabilities. It should be noted that implicit judgement resources (or token as in the examples below) are also deployed to reflect the proficiency or qualification of the appraised.

Affect resources rarely appear at the MP stage, with only the following two instances representing the emotional response and feelings of the participants:

(a)	The students were then informed of their common syntax mistakes [-app] and appropriate [+app] pedagogies were applied so as to prevent the students from making the same mistakes [-app] again.
(b)	They made up about 40% of the total number of errors [-app]; therefore, they seemed to be the most serious [-app] problems [-app] that the subjects encountered in their learning.
(c)	For these reasons, they could be evaluated as “inexperienced [-jud] writers” (Yasuda, 2011, p.116).
(d)	The teacher in study is an experienced [+jud] female teacher with good pronunciation and excellent class management skills [+jud].
(e)	All of them were Form 5 school leavers [-jud: token] and failed [-jud: inscribed] in their English Examinations in the HKCEE 2011 or before.
(e)	Having the certificate [+jud: token] means the completion [+jud: inscribed] of the course which would also be essential to their further study.
(f)	It is selected as the researcher is attracted [+aff] by the shooting pink cover and colourful layout of the textbook.
(g)	She was young in twenties and interested [+aff] in experimenting innovative approaches in her teaching.

 

Language of evaluation is necessary in the Methodology and Participant stage to effectively communicate to the readers the importance of the writers’ study as solutions to the problems identified at the earlier stages. Effective student writers tended to pattern this stage with judgement resources to give an account of the participants to distance away from personal emotional judgement of the appraised, although examples (f) and (g) demonstrate the possible Affect values present in the research papers, meaning the student writers are still adjusting themselves between the deployment of emotive lexis and institutionalised lexical items to evaluate.