Pre-service EFL teachers’ language awareness and ideologies about stance: A phenomenographic study

Stance is both a key and problematic domain for effective English for Academic Purposes (EAP) reading and writing. Insufficient awareness of the stance, cultural attitudes, and poor teaching have been identified as underlying sources of stance-related difficulties. Focusing on stance may thus be a pivotal reading-to-write lens to improve English academic literacy. However, few studies have investigated pre-service teachers’ language awareness and ideologies about different stance markers. The goal of this paper is to describe the stance-focused conceptions and ideologies of a group of sixteen Mexican undergraduate pre-service teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) who are also EFL learners. We used phenomenographic interviews and analysis to achieve this goal. We found three types of conceptions: stylistic, critical, and metaideological. The less sophisticated stylistic conceptions are the most prevalent. Only two participants showed metaideological conceptions. Two language ideologies were found: an ideology of linguistic objectivity that dismisses all stance markers and another that values affect markers but dismisses first-person ones. The participants were not generally able to comprehend authorial perspectives encoded by stance and tended to evaluate stance-containing texts as unacademic, notably if they contained first-person markers. These results imply that pre-service teachers should be made aware of the argumentative and epistemic functions of stance markers. They should also increase their awareness of diverse language ideologies about such markers that circulate across national and disciplinary contexts.