Appraisal resources in spoken promotional texts: Novice versus professional marketers

Ni Putu Era Marsakawati ORCID

era.marsakawati@undiksha.ac.id

Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha, Indonesia

Fadhila Yonata ORCID

Fadhila.yonata@stainkepri.ac.id

STAIN Sultan Abdurrahman Kepulauan Riau, Indonesia

Marsakawati, N.P.E. & Yonata, F. (2024). Appraisal resources in spoken promotional texts: Novice versus professional marketers. Language Value, 17(1), 27-50. Universitat Jaume I ePress: Castelló, Spain. http://www.languagevalue.uji.es.

July 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6035/languagev.7626

ISSN 1989-7103

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to describe how novice and professional marketers use appraisal resources in their spoken promotional texts. To achieve this aim, content analysis was applied. The data were gathered from the performance of novice and professional marketers in presenting spoken promotional texts and were analyzed by using Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory framework. The research findings revealed that both marketers had similarities and differences in using appraisal resources. In terms of similarity, both marketers used attitude resources, particularly appreciation resources. In terms of differences, the novice marketer had fewer types of appraisal resources than the professional marketer; the novice one also had fewer lexical items to demonstrate his/her evaluative stance than the professional marketer; and the novice marketer tended to create persuasive text with a less rigid structure. The research findings suggest ESP teachers should provide scaffolding strategies for students to practice using adequate appraisal resources to create a powerful persuasive text.

Keywords: evaluative language; interpersonal meaning; persuasive text; spoken promotional text; systemic functional linguistics.

I. INTRODUCTION

Promoting tourist attractions is one of the important skills that students majoring in English for tourism should master because it is one of the social practices that would be performed in their workforce. According to Alexandrescu and Milandru (2018), promotion is one of the communication strategies used to sell a product or service to pique potential customers’ interest in accepting or purchasing the promoted product/service. If promotion can be done effectively, the sales targets set by the company can be achieved successfully. In so doing, the company’s profit can be maximized.

To enable the students to participate effectively in the marketing practice, the English for Specific Purposes (henceforth ESP) lecturers need to provide them with both knowledge and language skills in the field of English marketing. This means that in ESP learning, students should be taught specialized English languages that are relevant to their specific social practice or future career field. In the context of English for tourism course, students are trained to perform social practices that are similar to real-world tasks. This can be viewed as a rehearsal period for the students before they enter the real world (Widodo, 2015). This also can serve as a solid bridge for students to enter their future careers. As a result, they would socially participate in their future career well (Mickan, 2012, 2017). Thus, it is important for the students to be exposed in promotional activities, such as creating spoken promotional texts.

To effectively achieve the goal of the promotional texts, the ESP students (henceforth, novice marketers) should understand how to structure their texts well by adhering to a distinct generic structure and specific language features (Hyland, 2019). One language feature that should be used by marketers in composing powerful persuasive texts is evaluative language. According to Ho (2019), evaluative language is one of the language features used as a marketing linguistic strategy as in a promotional text, which consists of appraisal resources that are used to evaluate people, actions, events, and processes in texts (Martin & White, 2005). Rooted in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), evaluative language is believed can provide various ways of linguistic realization of interpersonal meanings in language use.

This interpersonal meaning is critical for proper delivery because when doing promotions, marketers do not only convey information about the promoted destinations but also express their feelings, opinions, and judgments. Interpersonal meanings are realized in SFL through an evaluative language system that includes attitude, engagement, and graduation. The attitude subsystem in this study deals with the marketers’ positive/negative emotions toward people or things, that can be divided into three: affect, appreciation, and judgement. Engagement is concerned with the marketers’ perspectives on the perspectives of others, consisting of four types: proclaim, disclaim, entertain, and attribute. Graduation, consisting of force and focus, addresses the phenomenon of grading, in which feelings are amplified, and categories are blurred (Istianah & Suhandano, 2022; Wu, 2018).

Based on our preliminary observation in an ESP classroom (English for tourism), novice marketers still have limited appraisal resources to create their spoken persuasive texts. Compared to the professional marketer (the one who have experiences working in tourism marketing), the novice marketer used fewer registers to express interpersonal meanings than the professional one. They employed simple and repetitious appraisal resources, which rendered the resulting presentation boring. Different from the professional one who produced more various appraisal resources to create the warm tone of the message, the novice seemed to carelessly use appraisal resources. This might be due to their lack of experience and knowledge in creating influential, persuasive texts (Mills & Dooley, 2014; Mills & Stone, 2020; Purnamasari et al., 2021; Thu, 2021). Whereas appraisal resources are considered as an essential component in a promotional text (Xie & Teo, 2020). Thus, to create effective promotional texts, the text producers need to use the appraisal resources to express their point of view on the promoted products or services.

The disparity in performance between novice and professional marketers in promoting tourist destinations serves as the primary drive for this research. This phenomenon is not only interesting but also crucial to be investigated. By comparing the performance of the novice and the professional marketers, the gaps in the marketers’ performances can be found. These gaps might provide a link for novice marketers to possess the skills needed in their workplace. This could help them build the skills required to become professional tourist marketers. We believe that if they could have this competency, they would be able to effectively participate socially in their future workplaces.

Due to the importance of appraisal resources, numerous researchers have conducted studies to investigate how appraisal resources are used in promotional texts. Ho and Suen (2017) investigated how appraisal resources were used to promote a city’s core values. Kristina et al. (2017) examined the construction of promotional texts in the Indonesian Batik industry, while Wu (2018) and Qian and Law (2021) delved into the use of appraisal resources in tourism and hotel websites in China, and Istianah and Suhandano, (2022) and Isti’anah (2020) studied tourism websites in Indonesia from the lens of ecolinguistics perspective. These studies have only examined how appraisal language is used in written promotional texts while limited studies focused on spoken promotional texts. Additionally, the previous studies were set in authentic business settings, while studies investigating how students perform spoken promotional texts were scarcely found. Existing research on students’ use of appraisal language focuses on non-promotional-aimed written texts, such as in academic paper’s abstracts (Alghazo et al., 2021), introduction sections (Alramadan, et al., 2020; Fitriati & Solihah, 2019), genre-based writing including descriptive texts (Mendale et al., 2019) and exposition texts (Xu & Nesi, 2019; Yu, 2021; Yuliana & Gandana, 2018), and multimodal texts (Unsworth & Mills, 2020).

These studies have provided empirical findings about the use of appraisal resources in persuasive texts. However, to our knowledge, we believe that there are still some important elements that need to be investigated further. First, the previous studies have only focused on the use of appraisal resources in written persuasive texts. Second, the previous studies provide less attention on comparing the performance of novice and professional marketers. As a matter of fact, research aiming to compare novice and professional is important to enrich empirical findings from the sociocultural perspective. In addition, this investigation is also beneficial to reveal the gaps found between novice and professional speakers in employing appraisal resources in their persuasive texts.

To fill the empirical gaps, we conducted this study by focusing on investigating how different speakers (novice and professional marketers) used appraisal language in their spoken promotional texts. From this study, the students and the English lecturers could reflect on what they have gained so far. The research findings might be used as a guide to either maintain or improve the persuasive presentation performances of the students in persuading the customers. Accordingly, ESP lecturers should provide appropriate texts (Agustien, 2016) to achieve the purpose of communication in certain contexts.

This study could help to empirically establish what appraisal resources are appropriate for professional tourism marketers to employ in spoken promotional texts. This can give pedagogical insight into the field of ESP programs and vocational English schools dealing with the tourism industry. The study may have classroom implications for using appropriate and effective language resources to create influential promotional texts. Thus, the current study is expected to help raise teachers’ and students’ awareness of the importance of using appraisal resources in promotional texts.

II. APPRAISAL RESOURCES

Appraisal resources is a system of interpersonal meaning that can be used by language producers to negotiate their social relationships by telling their listeners how they feel about things or people. There are three kinds of appraisal language that can be used by the speakers to enact their interpersonal meaning. The first subsystem is attitude. Attitude is concerned with the speakers’ feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments of behavior, and evaluation of things. Thus, it is divided into three regions of feelings: affect, judgement, and appreciation. Affect refers to resources for expressing different types of feelings, such as happiness (e.g., the student is happy), security (e.g., the student is confident), and satisfaction (e.g., the student is absorbed). Judgement deals with resources for judging characters and behaviors of people in terms of social esteem and social sanction. Judgement of social esteem can be broken down into normality (how unusual someone is, e.g., It is very strange of him to act that way), capacity (how capable someone is, e.g., He is a clever man), and tenacity (how resolute someone is, e.g., He is determined to keep going). Judgement of social sanction can be viewed in terms of veracity (how truthful someone is, e.g., He is honest) and propriety (how ethical someone is, e.g., He is a generous person). Appreciation is the subsystem of resources for aesthetic evaluation of objects, artifacts, entities, presentation, and other natural phenomena. It has three subtypes: reaction (it is related to affection, e.g., The painting is beautiful), composition (it is related to perception, e.g., The picture is symmetrical), and valuation (it is related to cognition, e.g., This decoration is unique). These three resources of affect can be positive and negative and are expressed explicitly or implicitly.

The second resource of the appraisal system is engagement. It is concerned with sourcing attitudes and the interaction of voices in speech. It is concerned with the various linguistic resources that speakers use to change and negotiate the arguability of their utterances. Resources in engagement are dialogic in nature. Martin and White (2005) classify engagement into four taxonomies: disclaim (resources used to reject or negate propositions, e.g., You don’t need to give up potatoes to lose weight), proclaim (resources used to represent highly warrantable propositions, e.g., Of course, he is happier now), entertain (resources used to present propositions indicating possible positions, e.g., Probably, he is lying), and attributive (resources used to present propositions as grounded in the subjectivity of an external voice, e.g., The doctor claims that it is poisonous). Disclaim and proclaim are grouped in contraction resources; meanwhile, entertain and attribute are categorized as expansion resources.

The third resource of the appraisal system is graduation. It attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified, and categories are blurred. Martin and White (2005) divide graduation into two areas: force and focus. Force refers to the system of resources to scale the intensity of meanings from low to high or vice versa or turn the volume up and down. This can be done through the intensification of quality (e.g., He is very smart) or process (e.g., He looked closely at the book) or through quantification of number, mass, or extent (e.g., It is a huge problem).

Focus can be understood as the system of resources to broaden and or narrow terms that symbolizes a particular category membership. This can be done through sharpening (e.g., He is my real friend) or softening (e.g., I am kind of upset by what you said). These two areas of graduation are also mentioned in the framework of appraisal proposed by Eggins and Slade (1997), in which they divide graduation into enrichment (resources used to add an attitudinal coloring to a meaning, augmenting (resources used to amplify attitudinal meaning), and mitigation (resources used to downplay speakers’ personal expressions). Having studied graduation taxonomies of Martin and White (2005) and Eggins and Slade (1997), we decided to apply the framework of graduation proposed by Martin and White (2005) because it covers the three areas of Graduation resources mentioned by Eggins and Slade (1997).

III. RESEARCH METHOD

This study aims to describe how novice and professional marketers use appraisal language in spoken promotional texts. To achieve this aim, a qualitative content analysis was employed to analyze language in discourse. According to Krippendorff (2018), content analysis entails a close reading of the text and a systematic discursive practice in which the researchers are immersed in the text to investigate the phenomenon under investigation by interpreting the text (Drisko & Maschi, 2016). In order to investigate novice and professional marketers’ appraisal resources in promotional texts, we classified qualitative textual data into clusters of similar entities or conceptual categories.

The data of the study were two videos of novice and professional marketers downloaded from YouTube. The novice marketer was a male student practicing promoting Tacloban city. Meanwhile the professional marketer was a female tourism marketer promoting Tacloban city. A video project created by a student to fulfill the learning task was a video of a novice marketer’s performance. In this video, the student practiced promoting a tourist destination (Tacloban City). In his promotional text, he promoted some tourism places in Tacloban city, festivals, and traditional foods. Meanwhile, the video of a professional marketer’s performance was a real promotional video that was published purposively by the Tacloban city government to promote their place. In this video, the professional marketer promoted tourism spots in Tacloban city, festivals, delicacy foods, and accommodations. There are some factors to consider when selecting these two videos: a) the two videos promote the identical tourist destination (both videos promote Tacloban City); b) the video length is between 6-10 minutes; c) the videos provide sufficient data; and d) the audio and visual of the videos are clear.

The collected data were analyzed in the following ways: (i) transcribing data manually. This transcription technique was chosen because it allowed us to become acquainted with data; (ii) coding clauses. Within the clauses, we identified different types of appraisal resources. We highlighted lexical items that contained appraisal resources by using different color. We used a coding analysis template proposed by Martin and White (2005); and (iii) data classification. After the data had been identified, we classified them according to their categories. For example, the affect subsystem was assigned to lexical items such as happy, excited, and worried. Positive and negative emotions were assigned to these registers.

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In this section, we present our findings and discuss them. Section one presents research findings on the novice marketer’s use of appraisal resources. Section two presents research findings related to the professional marketer’s use of appraisal resources. Section three discusses research findings by comparing and contrasting novice and professional marketers’ use of appraisal resources.

IV.1. Appraisal Resources Used by the Novice Marketer

Table 1 shows that the novice marketer used all types of appraisal language: attitude, engagement, and graduation. Among these resources, he used attitude resources the most, specifically appreciation, followed by graduation and engagement. The following are examples of clauses containing each subsystem.

Table 1. The Distribution of Appraisal Language by the Novice Marketer

Attitude

Engagement

Graduation

Affect

Judgement

Appreciation

Expansion

Contraction

Force

Focus

Entertain

Attribute

Disclaim

Proclaim

0

0

13

1

0

2

0

12

0

0%

0%

45%

4%

0%

8%

0%

43%

0%

IV.1.1. Attitude

Data analysis revealed that the novice marketer used one of the three attitude resources: appreciation. Examples 1-5 show resources for appreciation.

  1. Tacloban city is the most fabulous city in the Eastern Visayas.
  2. which is made with a sweet mixture of coconut.
  3. This delicious chocolate in the delicacy is known for its soft and sticky texture.
  4. Suman is one of the famous Filipino delicacies.
  5. What makes the version stand out is the use of Latik syrup caramelized coconut cream as a sauce.

The five samples (1-5) demonstrate how the novice marketer employed lexis, such as fabulous, sweet, delicious, soft, sticky, famous, and stands out in his promotional video. The lexis fabulous was used to appraise the city; meanwhile, other registers (sweet, delicious, soft, sticky, famous, and stand out) were used to evaluate Tacloban’s culinary scene. These registers were employed to attract the audience’s interest in trying the food.

IV.1.2. Graduation

The second most common type of appraisal language used by the novice marketer was graduation. Graduation is divided into two parts: force and focus. Between the two, the novice marketer only used force. Force determines the amount (quantification) or intensity (intensification). The clauses below are examples of forces used by a novice marketer.

  1. Tacloban City is the most fabulous city in the Eastern Visayas.
  2. Tacloban, also known as one of the largest city.
  3. There are so many contests in Tacloban.
  4. You will find Bukayo in every part of the country.
  5. it is the longest bridge in the Philippines.

The novice marketer attempted to attract prospective visitors to Tacloban by intensifying and quantifying in Examples 6-10. The intensification resources (the most, the largest, every, and the longest) were chosen to emphasize the meanings to grasp the prospective visitors’ intent to visit the city. He also used quantification resources to gain similar purpose (such as so many).

IV.1.3. Engagement

Another type of appraisal system used by the novice marketer was engagement. The novice marketer created a different level of intimacy through engagement resources by either affirming or distancing himself from what was said. The novice marketer performed two types of engagement among the four engagement resources used in this study: disclaim and entertain.

Disclaim was the novice marketer’s first frequent type of engagement resource. He used disclaim to express his denial or rejection of something. This is demonstrated in the examples below.

  1. (…) but makes it unique.
  2. we cannot deny the fact (…) (that the spot is undeniably superb).

It is clear from the preceding clauses that the word “but” in Example 11 was used to express his concession or counter-expectation. Meanwhile, the negation in Example 12 indicated acceptance that the location was undeniably fantastic.

The novice marketer’s second most common type of engagement was entertain. He used the modal verb to make use of this resource. The example is given below.

  1. you will find Bukayo in every part of the country.

In Example 13, the novice marketer used a modal auxiliary (will) to demonstrate his range of possibilities. This clause guarantees visitors will find Bukayo (traditional bread) if they visit the location.

IV.2. Appraisal Resources Used by the Professional Marketer

Table 2 shows that the professional marketer used all types of appraisal resources. The most dominant use of appraisal used is attitude. The following subsystem of attitude is engagement and graduation, respectively. Each type of appraisal system used by the professional marketer is presented below.

Table 2. The Distribution of Appraisal Resources by Professional Marketer

Attitude

Engagement

Graduation

Affect

Judgement

Appreciation

Expansion

Contraction

Force

Focus

Entertain

Attribute

Disclaim

Proclaim

5

0

23

14

0

3

0

8

2

8%

0

43%

24%

0

4%

0

17%

4%

IV.2.1. Attitude

Attitude is an appraisal system used to show the professional marketer’s feelings or emotions concerning people or things/phenomena. The professional marketer employed two types of attitude resources: appreciation and affect.

Appreciation is the most frequent attitude resource used by the professional marketer. The examples are presented as follows.

  1. Tacloban is beautiful.
  2. Tacloban is a place like no other.
  3. Come to Tacloban for the popular sites and landmarks.
  4. the Anibong memorial shipwrecked place to learn the history.
  5. they are all made with love.
  6. their Binagols are beyond compared.
  7. The festival of lights is so so much fun.
  8. You will love the people behind the colorful costumes.
  9. You will love the genuine hospitality.
  10. you love the gentle smiles.

Examples 14–23 demonstrate how the professional marketer used a variety of lexis to promote the city, cuisine, festivals, and people of Tacloban. The words “beautiful,” “a place like no other,” “popular,” and “memorial” were used to describe the city’s beauty. In example 15, the professional marketer even used a metaphor to persuade the audience that Tacloban was the only fantastic place to visit. Aside from promoting the location, the professional marketer promoted the food by using phrases like “made with love” (Example 18) and “beyond compared” (Example 19). In Example 18, the professional marketer explained why the food tasted so good. She then emphasized the excellent taste of the food, such as Binagols, which were superior to other foods. In Examples 20 and 21, the professional marketer used the words “fun” and “colorful” to promote festival festivities that prospective visitors could see and enjoy at Tacloban city. In Examples 22 and 23, the professional marketer appraised the citizen’s smiles and hospitality. These were used to emphasize that Tacloban City do not only offer the city’s beauty but also its people’s beauty.

Furthermore, affect was the second most frequent type of attitude resource used by the professional marketer. The examples are presented as follows.

  1. You’d like the destinations.
  2. you’d love the warm welcome.
  3. You’ll like the food.
  4. you’ll love the people that make them.

The registers “like” and “love” were used in the examples above to assure prospective visitors that they would be happy when they visited Tacloban City. The professional marketer assures that the prospective visitors will have positive emotions when they visit Tacloban city.

IV.2.2. Engagement

Another type of appraisal used by the professional marketer to contract or expand herself from what is spoken was engagement. The professional marketer used two types of engagement resources out of the four available: entertain and disclaim.

The examples of entertain resources used by a professional marketer are shown in the following clauses.

  1. You’d like the destinations.
  2. you’d love the warm welcome.
  3. You’ll like the stay.
  4. you’ll love the genuine hospitality.
  5. I’m going to tell you.
  6. why not stay for a while and see for yourself.
  7. why you should come to the Tacloban.

Examples 28-31 show that the professional marketer used modals to show his range of possibilities. The modal auxiliaries were “would,” “will,” and “going to” which indicate decreasing the coercion and increasing imaginary advantages and expectations of the destinations. In examples 33 and 34, the professional marketer suggested that prospective visitors visit Tacloban to see and enjoy its beauty.

Moreover, another identified engagement resource was disclaim. The professional marketer used “but” as disclaim resource:

  1. But once you are on the way [Going there is quite a journey, but once you are on the way, you make it the journey within yourself].

In Example 35, the conjunction “but” was used to contrast the visitors’ experience in Tacloban. It was used to pique visitors’ interest in exploring Tacloban’s beauty.

IV.2.3. Graduation

In this study, the professional marketer used force and focus resources as the graduation resources. Here are some excerpts including in force.

  1. There are so many places to see.
  2. all the reasons why you should come to the Tacloban.
  3. because they are all made with love.
  4. The festival of lights is so so much fun.
  5. our Sagmani, Moron, and Binagol are some of the best.
  6. the happiest people in the world.

Quantification resources include the registers “so many” and “all.” In Example 36, the professional marketer used “so many” to emphasize that Tacloban had many places. The lexis “so much fun”, “the best”, and “the happiest” were classified as intensification and crucial for intensifying meanings. Even in Example 39, the professional marketer used repetition (so so) to emphasize that the festivals were enjoyable.

The second type of graduation in the professional marketer’s performance was focus. The variation of lexis used was also limited to “just”. It was used to soften the meaning of the professional marketer’s message. Focus example used by professional marketer is provided below.

  1. It’s not just a festival.

In this example, the professional marketer claimed that the festival that prospective visitors would enjoy is not ordinary, but rather unique.

IV.3. The Similarities of Appraisal Resources Used by the Novice and Professional Marketer

Drawn from the research findings, there were five similarities in the use of appraisal resources in spoken tourism promotion videos of novice and professional marketers. First, the two marketers used all appraisal resources: attitude, engagement, and graduation. Attitude concerns the speaker’s feelings, including emotional reactions, behavioral judgments, and evaluation of things. Engagement concerns sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions. Graduation addresses the phenomenon of grading, in which feelings are amplified, and categories are blurred (Martin & White, 2005). In the context of tourism promotion, the use of these resources is critical (Istianah & Suhandano, 2022). According to Deng et al. (2021), the primary function of a sales promotion is persuasive in that the speaker seeks a specific response from his audience. To accomplish this, the speaker must employ appraisal resources to influence and persuade the audience. This argument is consistent with Miller et al. (2014), who state that evaluative resources have been discovered to be one of the significant components of persuasive texts, such as in product advertisements. Furthermore, our findings confirm the findings of Ho and Suen (2017), Wu (2018) and Xie and Teo (2020), who explored that appraisal resources could assist text producers in creating persuasive effects for text receivers.

Second, both marketers used appreciation the most in the attitude subsystem. A careful examination of the attitudinal system revealed that appreciation was the most preferred resource used by the two marketers of the three subsystems of attitude (affect, judgment, and appreciation). They tended to favor appreciation over the other resources to make the text sound more appreciative rather than emotional or judgmental (Hood, 2004). This is due to the nature of the text itself, which is intended to persuade the audience to visit the promoted places. Marketers have to choose special registers to evaluate the presented product to accomplish this goal. This is accomplished by utilizing appreciation resources.

Third, both marketers evaluated the product more positively than other entities. This is done to pique the audience’s interest in visiting the promoted places. This is consistent with Bhatia’s (2014) argument that promotion is generally directed at potential customers known to have a need (immediate or future) for the product being promoted. As a result, the most essential function of product promotion is to assess the product in terms of the target customers’ perceived interests, needs, or inhibitions. The current study confirms the findings of Yang (2016), who discovered empirically that appreciation resources were used the most by their research participants in persuasive texts.

Fourth, both marketers used the fewest judgment resources. This finding appeared to contradict Puspita and Pranoto’s (2017) findings. Their study results revealed that the authors of the text used judgment resources the most of the three attitudinal resources. The nature of the topic discussed in the texts may explain the discrepancy in research findings between the current study and Puspita and Pranoto’s one. The topic of the current study is promoting tourist destinations. As a result, marketers place a higher value on the promoted tourist destinations.

On the other hand, Puspita and Pranoto (2021) discuss the attitude of the Japanese newspaper in narrating disaster events and found that the writers emphasized human behaviors the most. The current study’s findings would provide empirical support for Liu’s (2013) argument that the different nature of the topics discussed in persuasive texts may result in differences in the distribution patterns of attitudinal resources used. Furthermore, this research finding supports the claim of Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) that the choice of registers is influenced by the social purpose of the text and the context of the actions in which language is embedded.

Fifth, regarding graduation resources, both marketers relied heavily on force. Both marketers used force more than focus on the current study. By doing so, these two marketers heighten the meanings contained in the attitudinal resources. This finding is consistent with the results of Kang (2015) and Wu (2018), who discovered that instead of using more focus, their research participants preferred to use force more frequently in their persuasive texts because the use of force can help speakers achieve their communicative goals more effectively.

IV.4. The Differences of Appraisal Resources Used by the Novice and Professional Marketer

Interestingly, our data analysis revealed differences in performance between novice and professional marketers in terms of appraisal resources used. First, in comparison to the professional marketer, the novice marketer employed fewer resources in the attitude subsystem. In contrast to the professional marketer, who used appreciation and affect, the novice marketer only used appreciation. In the professional marketer’s performance, she did not only appraise the place positively, but she also described the positive emotions that the visitors would experience when visiting the place. As a result, the text created by the professional marketer was more persuasive than the text created by the novice marketer. In addition to this, the professional marketer also expressed her attitude with more lexical items than the novice marketer. This disparity suggests that, compared to the professional marketer, the novice marketer lack knowledge of attitude resources. This is due to limited repertoire for expressing their attitudes, feelings, and emotions (Morton & Llinares, 2018; Ngo et al.,2012).

Second, the professional marketer appeared to adhere to more outstanding linguistic features of persuasive text when compared to the novice marketer. According to the appraisal analysis, the novice marketer used fewer types of appraisal resources and registers to show his attitude and stance to the audience. As a result, the professional marketer appeared to produce a more rigid persuasive text structure than the novice marketer. The professional marketer attempted to persuade the audience about the product by utilizing appraisal resources. As a result, the text produced by the professional marketer is thought to have a more substantial persuasive effect than that of the novice marketer. This research finding indicates that the novice marketers may need more persuasive text structure knowledge than professionals. According to Yu (2021), students usually lack a sufficient comprehension of genre structures and linguistics strategies. This may be the result of the limited opportunities for students to practice structuring persuasive texts for communicative functions in their classrooms (Noprianto, 2017). As a result, students’ texts frequently contain inappropriate structures and linguistic features.

When the students are unfamiliar with certain genres to be applied in certain contexts, the misuse of linguistic features occurred. To avoid this, students must understand text structures to achieve their communicative goals (Agustien, 2004) through the use of common grammatical patterns (Agustien, 2016) and linguistic features (Coffin, 2004). Concerning the students’ difficulty understanding text structure, teachers must provide learning activities that allow students to practice performing persuasive texts in real-world contexts.

V. CONCLUSIONS

The current study has highlighted the appraisal resources used by both novice and professional marketers in their spoken promotional texts. The evidence from this study suggests that despite some similarities, both marketers use appraisal resources differently. Since the novice marketer has less appraisal resources than the professional marketer, he appears to produce a less powerful persuasive text than the professional marketer. This research result shows the significant difference in performance between the novice and professional marketer when producing spoken promotional texts. In order to provide a solid bridge for the novice marketer to attain the required competency, the study’s findings suggest that English teachers should engage students with authentic texts and provide explicit scaffolding on how to structure a rigid persuasive text through the use of appraisal resources. It is also suggested for learning material developers to explicitly provide various lexical items that can be used by the students to structure powerful promotional texts.

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Received: 05 August 2023

Accepted: 17 July 2024