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This study investigated how L2 learners express epistemic stance in English academic writing focusing on the variation across learners’ levels and task types. Writing samples were essays (N=984) selected from the corpus of the English Placement Test (EPT) compiled at a Midwestern US university. The retrieved list of epistemic markers from lower- versus higher-level essays were compared in terms of the frequencies, functional, and structural distributions. Task-type differences were explored in terms of comparing the frequencies and functions of epistemic markers employed in summary versus argumentative essays. The results indicated that overall, higher-level students showed a preference for a more tentative stance than lower-level students. In terms of grammatical structures, higher-level students employed epistemic modals, adjectives, and nouns more frequently and within grammatically more complex structures compared to lower-level students. Lastly, higher-level students exhibited a tendency to take a more tentative stance in summarizing others’ arguments, and became relatively more assertive to claim their own arguments as opposed to lower-level students who showed less prominent differences across tasks. Implications for L2 academic writing pedagogy as well as for L2 writing assessment are discussed.
