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.