One central concept in students' academic writing is 'stance', which concerns writers' endeavor to project themselves while justifying knowledge contribution, crafting persuasive arguments and establishing social rapport with readers (Hyland, 2011). A substantial picture has been reached in terms of students' stance construction in their academic writings (Bruce, 2016; Crosthwaite, Cheung, & Jiang, 2017), however it remains at issue regarding how students' stance construction develops.The Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) provides useful perspectives and approaches to investigate learners' learning development in a complex system and reveal latent features that remains elusive using traditional approaches (Bot, Lowie, & Verspoor, 2005; Larsen-Freeman, 2006). This study, therefore, sets out to employ CDST approaches to investigate the development of Chinese EFL students' stance construction in their academic writing. Fifty-seven undergraduates writings were collected over 20 week span. The analysis of the stance features is based on Hyland's (2005) stance model concerning writers' intersubjective positioning, which is composed of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions. The texts were tagged by using MAXQDA software, and the occurrences of students' stance use were analyzed with DST techniques (i.e., LOESS smoothing, Monte Carlo technique, and linear regression). The analysis indicates great fluctuations along the development trajectories of the four types of stance features, and the LOESS analysis reveals notable trends in the development of four types of stance features. The findings provide evidence as to the developmental features of the EFL students' stance construction, and can be of high pedagogical value for EFL writing practitioners' understanding the developmental patterns and seeking appropriate teaching approaches to enhance students' stance construction and academic writing skills. ReferencesBruce, I. (2016). Constructing critical stance in University essays in English literature and sociology. English for Specific Purposes, 42, 13–25.De Bot, K., Lowie, W., Verspoor, M., & Verspoor, M. H. (2005). Second language acquisition: An advanced resource book. Psychology Press.Larsen-Freeman, D. (2006). The emergence of complexity, fluency, and accuracy in the oral and written production of five Chinese learners of english. Applied Linguistics, 27(4), 590–619. Crosthwaite, P., Cheung, L., & Jiang, F. (Kevin). (2017). Writing with attitude: Stance expression in learner and professional dentistry research reports. English for Specific Purposes, 46, 107–123. Hyland, K. (2011). Disciplines and discourses: social interactions in the construction of knowledge, 193–214. Thomas, D. P., Thomas, A. A., & Moltow, D. T. (2015). Evaluative stance in high achieving Year 3 persuasive texts. Linguistics and Education, 30, 26–41.
