Challenges of Nigerian Accounting Postgraduate Students in Taking up Stance in Ph.D. Theses in Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of stance linguistic features in accounting Ph.D. theses in a Nigerian university. We adopted a mixed-methods approach by combining a textual analysis of the theses and explored the context of writing of the participants similar to Swale’s textography approach. We compiled three corpora: Bayero University corpus of six accounting Ph.D. theses (BUK corpus); a United Kingdom corpus of six accounting PhD theses (UK corpus) and a corpus of eleven journal articles of accounting (JAA corpus). The results of textual analysis indicate that there is a higher frequency of hedges in all the three corpora than other stance features, followed by boosters, then attitudinal markers, and explicit self-mention features. One striking finding from the BUK corpus is that the authors are rarely used self-mention features compared to authors from other two corpora. However, the result of the chi-square indicates that the differences among the three corpora’s use of stance features are insignificant. The contextual data suggests that non-teaching of English for specific purposes and the traditional practices of Bayero University might be some of the possible factors that constrained authors’ use of stance linguistic features. We recommend introduction of teaching English for specific purposes on postgraduate programmes in Nigerian universities.