| This research investigates how student debaters realize their stance in the British parliamentary debate and why they employ some stance resources in the debate. It particularly seeks to analyze the linguistic realization of student debaters’ stance following the APPRAISAL framework by Martin and White (2005) and reveal student debaters’ implicit knowledge of stance, i.e., reasons for employing some stance resources, based on the stimulated-recall protocol by Gass and Mackey (2000). The setting of the research was a private university in Tangerang, Banten. The research specifically addressed two research questions: 1) How do student debaters realize their stance in the British Parliamentary Debate?; and 2) What are the student debaters’ reasons for using stance resources in the British Parliamentary debate? Qualitative design was opted to analyze the linguistic realization of stance in three domains of APPRAISAL: ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT, and GRADUATION and to elicit the student debaters’ rationales which motivated their linguistic choices in their stance-taking. Observation and stimulated-recall interview were selected as data collection instruments. 9 participants volunteered to have their debating performance recorded for debate text analysis. As for the stimulated-recall interview, only 3 participants were willing to be interviewed. The analysis followed the three main stages of coding proposed by Corbin and Strauss (1990), i.e., open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. In order to avoid broader interpretation of the data, the findings were subsumed under two main sections. Firstly, the data related to the first research question were presented following Martin and White’s (2005) APPRAISAL model which consisted of ATTITUDE (with its three subsystems: AFFECT, JUDGEMENT, and APPRECIATION), ENGAGEMENT (focusing on Heteroglossia with its dichotomy of dialogic CONTRACTION and dialogic EXPANSION and their respective subcategories, i.e., CONTRACT: PROCLAIM, CONTRACT: DISCLAIM, EXPAND: ENTERTAIN, and EXPAND: ATTRIBUTE), and lastly, GRADUATION (with its two systems to raise/lower intensity of altitudinal meanings, i.e., FORCE, and to sharpen/soften the focus of semantic categorization, i.e., FOCUS). Secondly, the data concerning the second research question were distributed in three themes concerning the student debaters’ reasons for ATTITUDE resources, ENGAGEMENT resources, and GRADUATION resources. The protocol for eliciting the complementary data followed Gass and Mackey (2000), however, specific questions were structured according to the textual analysis. The findings suggested that the student debaters have realized their attitudinal stance mostly in two domains of ATTITUDE, namely AFFECT and JUDGEMENT. They relied on non-authorial voices (e.g., second- and third-person singular and plural) to project their positive and negative emotional assessments, however, they used self-mention in the I/we + think/believe structure when projecting neutral AFFECT. They also tended to be dialogistic whereby they acknowledged the diversity of voices by either CONTRACTING (closing down) and EXPANDING (opening up) the dialogic space. The Heteroglossia in the debate was realized by a majority of CONTRACT: DISCLAIM: DENY, CONTRACT: DISCLAIM: COUNTER, and EXPAND: ENTERTAIN resources. Negations, concessive conjunction but, and deontic modal auxiliaries were among the resources frequently occurring in the student debaters’ counterargument and claim-making. They also deployed several resources of FORCE, e.g., Intensifier, Comment Adjunct, Repetition, Quantifier, and Metaphor to scale up and down their ATTITUDE. Although rarely used, FOCUS was instantiated in Vague Language (e.g., this thing, kind of) to soften the FOCUS and some Adverbs (e.g., clearly, truly) to sharpen the FOCUS of class membership. The student debaters understood the purposes of ATTITUDE and GRADUATION, however, they still had misconceptions regarding their use of ENGAGEMENT: EXPAND: ATTRIBUTE and ENGAGEMENT: CONTRACT: PROCLAIM: ENDORSE. Finally, this research had theoretical as well as pedagogical implications in that it provided insights into: 1) the literature on stance realization in the British Parliamentary debate as an oral genre in academic discourse; 2) the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) field where the teaching of content (debate materials) and authentic examples of strategic use of stance resources are advocated. |