ENTANGLED IN COLLIDING ACADEMIC WORLDS. A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO MULTILINGUAL ACADEMIC WRITING

Abstract

Corpus-based research on stance in academic writing has been shaped largely by analytical frameworks developed under conditions of scale and relative homogeneity, often relying on large, monolingual datasets. While these frameworks have been applied to both expert and novice writing, comparatively less attention has been paid to the methodological challenges that arise when they are used with small, multilingual learner corpora, particularly those involving uneven proficiency profiles and complex educational contexts. This article offers a reflexive methodological account of a study examining stance expression in undergraduate academic writing produced by the same multilingual learners in English and German as foreign languages. The study draws on a bilingual corpus of student essays and combines quantitative and qualitative corpus-based procedures with learner-reported data used to contextualise corpus findings. Rather than treating limited corpus size and proficiency asymmetry as variables to be controlled, the article conceptualises them as constitutive features of the research design. It discusses key methodological decisions concerning corpus comparability, including the use of texts written by the same students across languages and a negotiated approach to genre equivalence. Particular attention is paid to the identification of recurrent multi-word sequences, treated as potential lexical bundles through proportionally scaled frequency and dispersion thresholds, and to the cross-linguistic adaptation of functional taxonomies and stance frameworks in the context of German, an under-described language in this area. The article concludes by outlining transferable methodological principles for corpus-based research on stance in multilingual academic writing.