This book offers up-to-date insights into the long-standing controversy of whether or not Chinese learners of English adequately express their attitudes in written English. It compares four writing datasets from three groups of student writers (e.g., English-speaking students English texts, Chinese-speaking students Chinese texts, and both English and Chinese texts produced by the same group of Chinese-speaking students majoring in English), and applies the appraisal framework, an analytical tool developed in the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The book provides a nuanced view of the deployment of attitudinal patterns and the linguistic resources used for attitudinal evaluation in Chinese students English writing. Accordingly, it offers a valuable resource for all those interested in second language writing, contrastive rhetoric, second language acquisition and systemic functional linguistics.

Dr. Xinghua Liu received his PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Reading, UK and completed his post-doctorate training in writing research at Arizona State University, USA. He has extensive teaching and research experience in second language writing and is a published researcher in this area.
Dr. Anne McCabe obtained her Ph.D. in Language Studies at Aston University, UK, and has taught first-year University writing in English at Saint Louis University-Madrid Campus for over twenty-five years. She has published widely in areas related to academic writing, education, and the media, using a variety of discourse analytical tools.

Chapter 1 Contrastive Rhetoric.- Chapter 2 Evaluation in Student Writing: Constructing Interaction, Voice and Stance.- Chapter 3 Linguistic Study of Evaluation in Writing.- Chapter 4 A Study of Attitude in Student Writing.- Chapter 5 Appraisal Analysis.- Chapter 6 Conclusions and Implications.- References.- Appendices.