Article

Developing an authorial voice in PhD multilingual student writing: The reader’s perspective

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Abstract

Most scholars agree about the importance of an authorial voice in academic writing. There is also a growing body of research on how voice is manifested in texts at a word and phrase level, but relatively little that investigates readers' perceptions of authorial voice (the effect on the reader) or the development of voice over time. In our study, we explored these issues by eliciting the views of five supervisors as they read and evaluated authorial voice, in the texts of three PhD students, writing in English as an additional language (EAL). We used two sets of comparable texts written by the students relatively early and near the end of their PhD to address the issue of voice development. A thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews revealed what constituted evidence of authorial voice for the five expert readers. All were adamant that an authorial voice is crucial in the writing of PhD students, but found the task of defining and locating voice in the students' texts, and in discerning progress in students' abilities to articulate a convincing authorial voice very challenging. Of interest was the finding that the supervisors' language backgrounds, disciplinary specialities, personal histories, and preferences shaped their impressions of voice. These differences in perceptions of what voice entails held by supervisors from the same broad discipline raise questions about how we approach the teaching and assessment of voice.

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... Corpus-based research often examines the use of particular linguistic features that help present a credible writer identity in academic writing across different disciplines and genres (e.g., Hyland, 2012;Zhao, 2013Zhao, , 2019Zhao & Lyu, 2019). Researchers who adopt a reader response perspective tend to explicate how gatekeepers evaluate and reconstruct the authorial identity in blind peer review processes (e.g., Morton & Storch, 2019;Tardy & Matsuda, 2009). Others pay attention to identity construction processes and writing-related academic practices in particular academic contexts (e.g., Inouye & McAlpine, 2017;Wang & Parr, 2021). ...
... Based on these varied research interests, different terms have also been adopted to capture different aspects of the concept of discoursal scholarly identity, including voice or authorial voice (e.g., Matsuda, 2001;Morton & Storch, 2019), authorial identity (e.g., Işık-Taş, 2018), disciplinary identity (e.g., Hyland, 2012), writer identity (Ivanic, 1998), and academic/scholarly identity (e.g., Inouye & McAlpine, 2017). However, as the current literature often focuses on the construction of autobiographical identity in the real world (e.g., Clegg, 2008;French, 2019;Inouye & McAlpine, 2019;Lawrence, 2017), the features of a scholarly image in academic written discourse and the means of constructing such an image often remain implicit to students, supervisors, and writing instructors. ...
... Overall, the concept of discoursal scholarly identity refers to the image of a scholar as created and perceived on page through the use of particular discursive and non-discursive features (Ivanic, 1998;Matsuda, 2001Matsuda, , 2015 in various high-stakes research writing genres (e.g., academic publications, grant proposals, review reports, responses to reviewers' comments, and postgraduate theses/dissertations) (Inouye & McAlpine, 2019). According to Morton and Storch (2019), discursive features often include both linguistic choices (e.g., personal pronouns, hedges, and reporting verbs) and rhetorical choices (e.g., skillful use of topical sentences and organizational moves). Non-discursive features, on the other hand, could be "document design and visual elements" (p. ...
... It has been argued that this situation is attributed to the fact that stance-taking is rarely or tacitly discussed in writing instruction, especially in the context of EFL writing, which obfuscates this valued quality of academic writing to students (Aull and Lancaster, 2020). Stance scholarship thus frequently underscores the importance of facilitating learners' stance awareness and understanding, and equipping them with a robust metalanguage for consciously monitoring language choices in writing (Chang and Schleppegrell, 2011;Lancaster, 2014;Jou, 2019;Morton and Storch, 2019;Zhang and Zhang, 2021a). Following this strand, a few intervention studies with the explicit teaching of stance metalanguage have been conducted and students have been found to make considerable progress in stance-taking practices in writing (e.g., Chang and Schleppegrell, 2016;Crosthwaite and Jiang, 2017;Jou, 2019;Zhang and Zhang, 2021b). ...
... Studies with experienced writers found that their stance construction in writing were affected by their perceptions of stance which may vary across disciplines (Hyland, 2005) and degrees of professional experience (Yasuda, 2022). Similarly, Morton and Storch (2019) found that when reading PhD multilingual student writing, supervisors' perceptions of stance were shaped by their disciplines, personal background, and preferences. Zhao and Wu (2022) further found that, in raters' stance perceptions of EFL essays, students' perceptions of stance varied and Frontiers in Psychology 03 frontiersin.org ...
... This finding suggests that students still possessed limited language to explain assertive and tentative stance options though they were explicitly provided with stance metalanguage in instruction. It could be attributed to the insufficient time of instruction for significant changes in students' expanded metalanguage to become apparent, which may be shaped by their language background and personal histories (Sanders-Reio et al., 2014;Morton and Storch, 2019;Teng, 2022). ...
Article
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Scholars have underscored the importance of raising students’ awareness and understanding of stance-taking in academic writing. However, studies on the effects of the pedagogical intervention are just a few. To strengthen this line of inquiry, this paper reports on an intervention study with explicit instruction of stance metalanguage based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) Engagement framework and its effects on EFL students’ perceptions of stance as well as on their beliefs about academic writing. A treatment group (n = 26) and a comparison group (n = 24) were involved. An eight-week writing intervention was provided in the treatment group, while the comparison group received regular curriculum-based instruction. Data from multiple sources were collected prior to and after the writing intervention, including two five-point Likert-scale questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and reflective journals, to examine possible changes in students’ self-reported perceptions of stance and writing beliefs. Results showed that the intervention was effective in enhancing students’ stance awareness and transactional writing beliefs. Qualitative results further revealed that while the comparison group retained a preference for tentative stance after the writing instruction, intending to avoid potential challenges from readers, the treatment group exhibited a shift in preference for assertive stance valuing the strengths of claims. The treatment group further exhibited an inclination to adopt a wider range of stance options for various rhetorical purposes. Pedagogical suggestions are discussed.
... Originally a key concept in English rhetoric and composition, voice has, in the past few decades, gradually entered the realm of second language (L2) writing as a topic for discussion and debate, especially in relation to L2 writing instruction and assessment (e.g., Zhao, 2013;Helms-Park & Stapleton, 2003;Ivanič & Camps, 2001;Morton & Storch, 2019;Stapleton, 2002). Although theoretical conceptions of voice vary (e.g., Elbow, 1999;Matsuda, 2001;Prior, 2001;Stewart, 1972), as Canagarajah (2015) points out, researchers now generally agree on its amalgamated and dialogical nature, which means that authorial voice is probably realized through the interplay among the reader, the writer, and the text (Matsuda, 2015). ...
... Although theoretical conceptions of voice vary (e.g., Elbow, 1999;Matsuda, 2001;Prior, 2001;Stewart, 1972), as Canagarajah (2015) points out, researchers now generally agree on its amalgamated and dialogical nature, which means that authorial voice is probably realized through the interplay among the reader, the writer, and the text (Matsuda, 2015). A fair number of studies have examined the elements of the writer (e.g., Zhao, 2019;Canagarajah, 2015;Matsuda, 1997) and the text (e.g., Zhao, 2017;Hyland, 2008;Ivanič & Camps, 2001;Kuhi & Behnam, 2011;Yoon, 2017) in voice construction; however, relatively few have examined its construction and reconstruction from readers' perspective (Matsuda & Tardy, 2007;Morton & Storch, 2019;Tardy & Matsuda, 2009). ...
... Zhao (2013), for example, developed and validated a three-dimensional analytic voice rubric that measures voice across the ideational, affective and presence dimensions. The rubric has since been applied in various empirical studies on voice from different perspectives (e.g., Zhao, 2017Zhao, , 2019Fogal, 2020;Morton & Storch, 2019). Yoon (2017) even devised an automated Authorial Voice Analyzer (AVA) that measures voice strength by tallying occurrences of six types of voice elements (i.e., hedge, booster, attitude marker, self-mention, reader pronoun, and directive) identified in Hyland (2008) and validated by Zhao (2013). ...
Article
Although theoretical conceptions of voice vary, researchers now generally agree on its amalgamated and dialogical nature, highlighting the interplay among the reader, the writer, and the text (Canagarajah, 2015; Matsuda, 2015). While much research has investigated the elements of the writer and the text in voice construction, far less has examined voice reconstruction from readers’ perspectives. The current study therefore explores reader reconstruction of writer voice, focusing particularly on understanding the phenomenon of discrepant voice perceptions by different readers. Two raters double-rated 65 EFL essays, simulating the conventional writing assessment practice. Independent-samples t tests on various linguistic indices across essays that received consistent vs. inconsistent voice ratings were carried out to identify linguistic elements that might be sources of inconsistency in raters’ voice perceptions. Semi-structured rater interview was conducted to both triangulate quantitative findings and explore other potential sources of inconsistency. Results showed that most of the language features did not seem to be associated with discrepant voice perceptions, but raters’ differing perceptions of the effectiveness of certain language elements, essay structure, and idiosyncratic interpretations of certain evaluative criteria might lead to divergent reconstructions of voice. Implications were discussed to inform L2 writing assessment, pedagogy, and future research.
... In the social, academic writing sphere, voice refers to individual arguments and contributions to the disciplinary discourse. It is related to authorship and responsibility in discourse (Scollon, 1994) and mastery of genre conventions and sense of audience (Hyland, 2008cd, 2015aMorton & Storch, 2019). In fact, both the individual and social dimensions of voice are inseparable; voice is both individual and social at the same time (Matsuda, 2001;Prior, 2001). ...
... The individualistic view of voice has been criticised by sociocultural approaches (Helms-Park & Stapleton, 2003;Matsuda, 2001;Stapleton, 2002). The social and context-based approaches to writing have been primarily qualitative, seeing voice as dialogic, located in the writer-reader interaction and mediated by the text and writing as both individual and social (Hyland & Guinda, 2012;Morton & Storch, 2019;Zhao, 2019). However, research on voice development is still scarce (Fogal, 2019ab;Morton & Storch, 2019). ...
... The social and context-based approaches to writing have been primarily qualitative, seeing voice as dialogic, located in the writer-reader interaction and mediated by the text and writing as both individual and social (Hyland & Guinda, 2012;Morton & Storch, 2019;Zhao, 2019). However, research on voice development is still scarce (Fogal, 2019ab;Morton & Storch, 2019). (See Fogal, 2019a for a CDST view of voice, an updated discussion, and literature review). ...
Thesis
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The complexity and variability of the development of writing in a second language have motivated extensive theoretical and empirical research of relevance for language learning and teaching. Whereas there is abundant evidence about what develops in writing (e.g., linguistic aspects in texts, writing strategies, processes, and motivation) and why it develops (e.g., learner maturation, instruction, feedback), comparatively less is known about how writing development occurs. Understanding how learners of English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) develop their writing skills has grown in interest given the dominance of English as the current leading language for academic and non-academic communication. The present study investigates EFL learners' writing development in a foreign languages pre-service teacher education programme at a Colombian university. Drawing on the extensive body of ESL/EFL writing literature that has examined the complexity of writing development from distinct yet rather isolated angles and theoretical traditions, this study adopted a multi-lensed approach to investigate writing development as a writer-text-context compound. Methodologically, the study responds to calls for counterbalancing the partiality for quantitative cross-sectional studies of academic texts of groups of writers in EFL writing development research. Thus, it adopts a mixed-methods approach that investigated the participants' writing development over a 16-week academic semester. The quantitative phase examined writing development differences in groups from three curricular stages of the programme (initial = 31; middle = 29; final = 40; N=100) through a non-academic writing task and a questionnaire. The qualitative phase examined the developmental trajectories and the factors affecting the writing development of six individual learners (three higher scorers and three lower scorers selected from the three curricular stages) using interviews and six texts produced by each participant over the semester. Three independent raters evaluated the texts in the two phases of the study using a rubric developed for this study to reflect the comprehensive view of writing by including text-, writer-, and reader-related writing dimensions. The interviews and questionnaires provided data about writing development that cannot be seen in the texts. Email letters were chosen as a representative non-academic genre used by ESL/EFL learners in the context examined and globally. The findings showed significant differences across the groups. They revealed various developmental trajectories across the various writing dimensions and individual writers, associated with long- and short-term factors influencing EFL writing development. These findings cast light on what develops, why it develops, and how development occurs at both group and individual levels in an EFL situation. It was found that writing progress is limited but significant, nonlinear, and resulting from an interplay between contextual and individual characteristics (e.g., L1, family, instruction, personality, motivation, proficiency, and age). It was also found that writing development is also linked to interactions between writing facets (e.g., content, task, genre, language, authorial voice, audience awareness, language, readability, writing situation) in a way that resembles a self-organising system (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008a). While the present study was exploratory, the comprehensive view adopted provides a better understanding of writing development to inform EFL writing research, teaching, and assessment. The complexity and variability of writing development remind L2 writing researchers, teachers, and evaluators that, as the writing progress is not linear, having times in which there is no evidence of progress, or and at times, apparent regression, caution is needed in the evaluation of EFL learners' writing proficiency.
... Thesis and dissertation writing has attracted increasing attention in recent years to understand how less experienced writers are acculturated into the academic community through this important writing task in their graduate life (Bitchener & Basturkmen, 2006;Botelho de Magalhães et al., 2019;Geng & Wharton, 2016;Morton & Storch, 2019;Peng, 2019). Many of those studies are on doctoral candidates; only a few have probed master students' writing (Samraj, 2008;Sun, 2015;Xie, 2016). ...
... While embarking on their academic journey, many graduate students face the challenge of conveying authoritative authorial voice in writing (Botelho de Magalhães et al., 2019;Dressen-Hammouda, 2014;Morton & Storch, 2019). In their critical review of empirical studies that examined the features of voice in academic writing, Stock and Eik-Nes (2016) pinpointed that many studies have followed Hyland's (2008) framework to examine discursive linguistic features on voice construction; but the evaluation of voice is holistic, depending on the overall impression of content, structure, argument, language, etc. ...
... 208) to evaluate voices in EFL argumentative writing. PhD supervisors in Morton and Storch (2019) judged voices in student writing holistically. To them, voice is "located in complex configurations of lexical, grammatical, organizational, and material dimensions" (p. ...
Article
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Effective authorial voice in academic writing helps researchers establish the value of their scholarly contributions. However, constructing an authorial voice is challenging for many novice L2 writers. Through tracking multiple drafts of master’s theses written by two Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) graduate students, this case study investigated changes in their authorial voices and the roles of advisor feedback in this process. We drew on three types of data: analysis of multiple thesis drafts for linguistic and content features of voice; advisor feedback on multiple drafts; and a questionnaire for the student writers’ understanding of authorial voice. The results indicate that the linguistic features of voice in their theses have remained largely unchanged, portraying them as unconfident student writers, but the content features have shown significant improvement, conveying authorial voices of novice researchers in the later drafts. Most of the student revisions followed their advisors’ feedback. The student participants’ questionnaire responses indicate their relative lack of awareness of the importance of language in voice construction. The results suggest that the authorial voice construction of the novice student writers is dynamic, developmental, and interactive with their advisors’ feedback over the thesis writing process. Pedagogically, other than feedback on content features of voice, classroom practitioners could also consider providing explicit instruction of and feedback on linguistic features to help students construct authoritative authorial voice in the academic context.
... Academic writing in higher education requires an inclusion of writers' propositions or arguments to indicate their understanding of the content knowledge and critical thinking regarding the topic at hand (Morton & Storch, 2019;Wingate, 2012). The concern that has arisen is how writers' propositions should be presented in writing. ...
... While most research tends to discuss writing from writers' perspectives, readers' influences on writers are not paid much attention to (Morton & Storch, 2019). In a discourse community, there are readers that are seen as gatekeepers, and writers seen as emerging professionals need to satisfy the readers' expectations in order to be accepted in the community (Johns, 1997;Shen, 1989;Swales, 2016). ...
... Using these features was suggested by their instructor. Playing the role of the gatekeepers in the discourse community and holding the image of the master of knowledge (Morton & Storch, 2019), the instructor's suggestion became the norms and common knowledge of writing to the students (Beck, 2006;Phan & Li, 2014;Viete & Phan, 2007). Students practice what they are taught by their instructors without a doubt as there is a long-lasting belief of the high position, credibility, and powerful influences of teachers on their students, particularly in Confucianism (Phan & Li, 2014). ...
... Voice has an elusive nature which results in being considered a concept which is intriguing and perplexing difficult to clarify (Zhao, 2013). Morton and Storch (2019) defined voice as the "ability to marshal information from sources in a way that goes beyond that sort of dutiful listing of things making it clear to the readers what was their voice or other people's voices" (p. 6). ...
... The results obtained from this research indicated that doctoral students tried to show their an authorial presence in each part of their dissertations even in the macrostructure (Morton & Storch, 2019). ...
... The four selves of Roz Ivanic's framework of writer identity can contribute to better understanding of how the autobiographical self (the author's background) and the self as author (the way the authorial identity is projected in the text written by author) link to the discoursal self (the effect of rhetorical choices and linguistic forms the writers use (Menard-Warwick, 2005). Selfhood is the writer's capability to show the idea that personal voices fulfil the expectations in the disciplinary communities (Morton & Storch, 2019). Hyland and Jiang (2016) observed that "personal judgements are convincing, or even meaningful, only when they contribute to and connect with a communal ideology or value system concerning what is taken to be interesting, relevant, novel, useful, good and so on" (p. ...
Article
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The present study reports on the findings of voice features across three text types under two different conditions. The results show significant differences in voice features in expository, but not in argumentative and descriptive text types, under timed and untimed conditions. The findings suggest that the analysis of voice features in different text types can inform writers of how successfully they create a balance in introducing their own perspectives.
... Constructing an authorial voice, which is essential in academic writing (Morton & Storch, 2019), could be challenging to writers who use English as an additional or foreign language (EAL or EFL), and absence of voice has been noted as the common problem among these writers (Flowerdew, 2001;Hyland, 2016). Voice is viewed to represent a writer's points of view, visibility in the text, and identity (Hyland & Sancho-Guinda, 2012;Tardy, 2016), and also to reflect the interaction between the reader and the text (Tardy, 2012). ...
... The construction of an authorial voice has been accorded increased importance in the research on essay writing (Çandarlı et al., 2015;Yoon, 2017;Zhao, 2013Zhao, , 2017 and academic research writing (Matsuda & Tardy, 2007;Morton & Storch, 2019;Peng, 2019). While how voice is represented textually remains a question open to discussion (Morton & Storch, 2019), the trend in this field has been associating textual voice with the deployment of metadiscourse, often based on Hyland's (2005) categories of interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse. ...
... The construction of an authorial voice has been accorded increased importance in the research on essay writing (Çandarlı et al., 2015;Yoon, 2017;Zhao, 2013Zhao, , 2017 and academic research writing (Matsuda & Tardy, 2007;Morton & Storch, 2019;Peng, 2019). While how voice is represented textually remains a question open to discussion (Morton & Storch, 2019), the trend in this field has been associating textual voice with the deployment of metadiscourse, often based on Hyland's (2005) categories of interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse. Interactive metadiscourse indicates the writer's awareness of readers' needs and is used to organize a text to facilitate readers' comprehension of the text, while interactional metadiscourse manifests the writer's presence and involvement with both the text and readers. ...
Article
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Voice is considered essential in academic writing, and metadiscourse is an important device contributing to voice. This study explores the use of metadiscourse and voice construction in Bachelor of Arts (BA) theses written at the onset and final stages by university undergraduates majoring in English in China. A corpus consisting of the discussion sections in the first and final versions of 35 BA theses was built, annotated, and analyzed. Two academics from this university were then invited to evaluate 10 pairs of the texts and specify textual elements that conveyed voice and to provide further comments in a follow-up interview. Results showed that the students used significantly more evidentials, hedges, and boosters in the final versions. The reviewers perceived minor growth in voice strength from the sample texts, and they commented that both content-related features and metadiscourse contributed to voice. This study highlights the importance of cultivating undergraduates’ awareness of voice construction and the use of metadiscourse in academic writing.
... In the social identity (construction) perspective, "Multilingualism is not what individuals have or lack, but what the environment, as structured determination and interactional emergence, enables and disables them to deploy" (Blommaert et al., 2005, p. 213). In addition to the influence of the social contexts in identity construction, recent studies (e.g., Flowerdew, 2008;Li and Deng, 2019) have also paid attention to the situation of English as Additional Language (EAL) writers, an issue that needs further research (Morton and Storch, 2019). Therefore, paying attention to the analysis of multilingual texts written by EAL writers and how they construct and negotiate their identities in different institutional settings are worth investigating (Canagarajah, 2015;Crawford et al., 2016;Dressen-Hammouda, 2014;Morton and Storch, 2019). ...
... In addition to the influence of the social contexts in identity construction, recent studies (e.g., Flowerdew, 2008;Li and Deng, 2019) have also paid attention to the situation of English as Additional Language (EAL) writers, an issue that needs further research (Morton and Storch, 2019). Therefore, paying attention to the analysis of multilingual texts written by EAL writers and how they construct and negotiate their identities in different institutional settings are worth investigating (Canagarajah, 2015;Crawford et al., 2016;Dressen-Hammouda, 2014;Morton and Storch, 2019). Crawford et al. (2014) elucidated that: ...
... In recent decades, there have been valuable studies regarding academic authorship and construction of academic identity, in particular from readers' perspectives (Hyland, 2008;Matsuda, 2001;Morton and Storch, 2019;Matsuda and Tardy, 2007;Tardy, 2012;Tardy and Matsuda, 2009). However, there are very few studies that explored this relation from L2 graduate writers' own perspectives (Crawford et al., 2016;Dressen-Hammouda, 2014;Flowerdew and Wang, 2015) in construction of their L2 academic identity (Hirvela and Belcher, 2001;Canagarajah, 2015;Flowerdew and Wang, 2015). ...
Article
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In two recent decades, academic authorship and construction of (academic) identity, more specifically in graduate bilingual/multilingual writers, have drawn attention in second language (L2) writing studies. From 'social identity' framework, the interconnection between bilingualism/multilingualism status and academic writing has played a very critical role in construction of their academic identity. Regarding this topic, autobiographical narratives proved a valuable methodological approach to understand deeply graduate bilingual/multilingual writers' insights about their academic authorship identity in their own words. There are very few studies that have examined the insights of individual graduate writers from their own words in narratives approach. More specifically , this issue has been less examined in English PhD programs which play a critical role in writing education. Thus, the present study, through Tajfel's (1978) social identity framework and autobiographical narratives, aims to create an effective platform for future graduate bilingual/multilingual writers' studies, in particular PhD candidates in English programs. To this end, the insights of two PhD bilingual/multilingual graduates in an English program have been examined to explore their insights about the interconnection between their bilin-gualism/multilingualism status and academic writing. This study also explores possible affordances and potential difficulties in constructing their academic authorship identity. The findings revealed that bilingualism/multi-lingualism status has influenced and constructed multiple identities for the two participant narrators in their academic writing education. Moreover, the findings readdressed the very significant role of higher education, and teaching profession that influenced and constructed academic identity of graduate writers. Finally, the current study offers some suggestions for future studies of graduate bilingual/multilingual L2 writing; it ends with implications for L2 writing education development.
... Our authorial voice is therefore intended to have a desired effect on the receiver of the communication who, in the case of writing, is the reader. There is a considerable body of research which has explored reader perceptions of authorial voice, including Hatch et al. (1993), who analyzed how readers form impressions about the writers' personalities, Rubin and Williams-James (1997), who examined the effects of perceived nationality of the writer on the reader's assessment of the text; Morton and Storch (2019), who investigated how students, teachers and researchers in one broad discipline, have contrasting understandings of authorial voice, and Lehman and Sułkowski (2023), who analyzed differences in the perception of what Eastern European doctoral students and established academics from the field of management, consider as the rhetorical nature of a convincing authorial voice. What we find from these studies is that writer identity, linguistically conveyed in voice, "does not singularly reside in the writer, the text, or the reader; rather, identity is part of the interpersonal meaning that is negotiated through the interaction among the writer and the reader mediated by the text" (Matsuda, 2015, p. 141). ...
... My point of departure in this study was that academic voice is developed and evolves within disciplines (e.g., Dressen-Hammouda, 2014) and that perceptions of what constitutes a convincing and engaging voice may vary not only across disciplines (e.g., Starfield & Ravelli, 2006;Hyland, 2005) but also within disciplines (Lehman & Sułkowski, 2023;Morton & Storch, 2019). The quantitative method employed in the study produced objective data that allowed me to answer comprehensively the two questions posed for the study concerning (1) statistically important variables that influence the participants' perception of voice (and possible differences in perception in the cohort) and (2) the specific rhetorical strategies that participants find both helpful and constraining in the creation of a convincing and engaging, in other words charismatic, authorial voice. ...
... The supervisor in this study, however, needed to ensure the linguistic as well as content quality of the manuscript to meet the expectations for academic writing to be highly articulate and well-proofread [13,15,16]. As revealed by Morton and Storch's study, clumsy writing with spelling errors, typos, and poorly structured paragraphs seemed to have a strong negative impact on the reader, who would be "less inclined to believe what the writer says" and "would read much more critically" ( [28], p. 20). ...
... While LLMs can be beneficial for grammar-checking, proofreading, and editing, they are no substitute for human language teachers and supervisors. Since these models are not error-free and may lack a complete contextual understanding, they should be used in tandem with, rather than as a substitute for, human expertise and judgement [28]. Institutional Review Board Statement: Ethical approval was not required for this study in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. ...
Article
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Doctoral students need guidance from both language teachers and academic supervisors for academic publication. However, previous studies have predominantly focused on corrective feedback from language teachers. The small number of studies on supervisory feedback were mainly undertaken in English-speaking countries on theses and dissertations, and mostly examined supervisors in applied linguistics, who probably have much in common with language professionals. To fill the research gaps, we investigated the foci of the feedback from a non-English-speaking supervisor on drafts of his doctoral students’ research article intended for a top conference in computer science. The results show that the supervisor commented not only on the content but also on the requirements for research writing, the logical flow of ideas, surface-level language issues, and visual elements. The findings can inform language teachers of what supervisors may value so that language professionals can provide feedback that better caters to the needs of students in research writing.
... Though metadiscourse analysis has received much attention in various contexts, few studies have focused on disciplinary metadiscourse (Lo, Othman & Lim, 2020), particularly the modality used in dissertations under the Systemic Functional Linguistic approach (Jomaa & Alia, 2019). Moreover, university students (Donahue, 2004;Morton & Storch, 2018) particularly EFL postgraduates (Jomaa & Bidin, 2017) seem to have difficulties in academic writing, especially the Arab postgraduates at UniSZA (Almatarneh, Rashid & Yunus, 2018), in adopting a stance and projecting their voice due to having insufficient guidelines on using evaluative expressions and/or being unaware of using metadiscourse markers. Therefore, this study explores the use of metadiscourse markers by EFL Arab postgraduates utilizing the Systemic Functional Linguistics approach. ...
... This can be ascribed to the authors' tendency to make their discussion arguable. Morton and Storch (2018) revealed the same result. In other words, their findings showed that students in the social sciences and humanities used more 'self-mentions' compared to students from the hard sciences due to the epistemological differences of the disciplines. ...
Article
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Several studies have focused on the use of stance, particularly in linguistic-based writing research. However, adopting an assertive stance toward the research being reviewed or reported is considered a challenging task for second language writers. Therefore, this study aims at exploring the use of stance in the introductory chapters of EFL Arab postgraduates' theses employing SFL approach at UniSZA. Data were collected qualitatively based on 22 introductory chapters of doctoral and master theses. The writers' stance was analysed using the SFL approach, whereas the interviews were analysed manually. The findings showed frequent and different use of finite modal operators, less and different use of adjuncts expressing modalisation and other purposes, and less frequent use of comment adjuncts and subjective, rather than the objective orientation of the soft and hard domains. The findings revealed that many participants showed unfamiliarity with the use of modality markers and appropriate social and linguistic conventions. The study concluded that authorial stance is very important to be explicitly taught to postgraduate students to enrich the quality of academic writing. This study provides significant resources for academic writing instructors, supervisors, and academic writers.
... The result of thorough measurement for seeking a voice in essay writing has achieved the milestone, as research on the graduated theses carried all types of measures. Such as Morton and Storch (2019) carried out a study in which two separate texts were compared written by PhD students in their first year and the last year of their graduation. These researchers adopted the readers' perspective and requested five PhD supervisors to assess the writer's voice delivered in those chosen texts based on Rubric from Tardy (2012). ...
... These researchers adopted the readers' perspective and requested five PhD supervisors to assess the writer's voice delivered in those chosen texts based on Rubric from Tardy (2012). Morton and Storch's (2019) research the innovation for producing qualitative results by requesting respective supervisors to underline text parts that may have the element of writers' voice and conduct a follow-up talk. ...
Article
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The rise of the internet has generated a need for fast online translations, which human translators cannot meet. Statistical tools such as Google and Baidu Translate provide automatic translation from one written language to another. This study reports the descriptive comparison of the machine-translation (MT) with human translation (HT), considering the metadiscoursal interactional features. The study uses a parallel corpus consisting of 79 texts translated from Chinese to English by professional human translators and machine translations (Baidu translate & Google translate) and a comparable reference corpus of non-translated English text. The statistical analysis revealed no statistically significant difference between Baidu and Google translate regarding all types of metadiscoursal indicators. However, the findings of this study demonstrate significant disparities in the interactional characteristics of various HT and MT groups. Compared to the metadiscourse features in non-translated English political texts, human translators were found to outperform machine translations in the use of attitude markers. In contrast, the distribution of directives in machine-translated texts is more native-like. In addition, MT and HT have utilized a significantly smaller number of hedges, self-mention, and readers than non-translated texts. Our results indicate that the MT systems, though still calling for further improvement, have shown tremendous growth potential and may complement human translators.
... This approach to investigating authorial voice using a posteriori categories has been used widely recently by asking readers to detect indicators of authority in the text. For example, Morton and Storch (2019) asked five PhD supervisors from the discipline of applied linguistics to assess authorial voice in three PhD theses written by EAL students in the same discipline. None of these supervisors supervised any of these theses. ...
... Voice could be traced on many levels; "from the proposition through to the whole text" (Thompson, 2012, p.119). Participant-readers in Morton and Storch's (2019) study identified some linguistic and rhetorical features that are indicators of authorial voice (e.g., reporting verbs, use of first-person pronouns; linking words and phrases, skilful use of topic sentences). Some of them even associated the presence of authorial voice with good academic writing and with the writer's overall character; careful writing indicated a carful personality and careful data collection and analysis. ...
Thesis
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This study aimed to investigate English as an Additional Language (EAL) academic literacies development of four Syrian established academics in exile in relation to their (i) academic networking, (ii) co-authorship practices, (iii) and authorial voice. Ethnography was used as a method via talk-around-text interviews; as a methodology, via questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, writing logs, academic network plots, and Text Histories; and as deep theorizing (Lillis, 2008) via conducting analysis of both conceptual as well as textual authorial voice. In relation to academic networking, it was found that all the types of networks, i.e., strong/weak, formal/informal, symmetrical/asymmetrical, durable/temporary, direct/indirect, and local/global played a role in the development of EAL academic literacies. Additionally, the relevant properties of nodes the co-authors possessed, i.e., the ability to conduct network, text-production, disciplinary, and publishing interventions, were essential for the Syrian academics’ EAL academic literacies development. Co-authorship was found to be a two-way interactive relation where EAL academic literacies development occurred as a result of a mutual investment by both sides. The participants and their co-authors invested in the collaborative work to different extents each depending on their level of motivation. Authorial voice was examined as conceptualisation and as a textual practice; the latter was investigated through a combination of a priori categories (metadiscourse features) and a posteriori categories, emerging as relevant from the data (disciplinary discourse conventions, textual positioning, and textual ownership). These components of voice were found to be in a dynamic interactive relationship, with the participants’ use of the relevant textual features becoming more frequent, more appropriate, and employed with more awareness as they progressed in their academic journeys. The study concludes with theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical implications.
... English for foreign language (EFL) novice writer-researchers are faced with an increasing pressure for international publication as a prerequisite for a sustainable career development in industry and academia. They need to be more cautious than Englishspeaking expert writers when looking for appropriate linguistic resources and rhetorical strategies to unfold new knowledge through texts as a knowledge creator on the one hand and negotiate existing discourses as a disciplinary community member on the other [1]. Metadiscourse contributes a great deal in these two aspects [2], thus attracting increasing attention from scholars in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and/or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) writing. ...
... RA production involves the writer's conscious or unconscious construction of a writer identity by assuming both the roles of researcher and discourse constructor [19]. Studies reveal that EFL writers encounter not only challenges in deploying linguistic and rhetorical resources [12,20], but also in developing a scholarly voice [1,21,22]. ...
Article
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English for foreign language (EFL) novice writer-researchers are faced with an increasing pressure for international publication as a prerequisite for sustainable career development in academia. The use of metadiscourse, as a key indicator for their discourse competence, has been a subject of research for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and/or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) scholars. This study investigates metadiscourse features of research articles’ (RA) results and discussion (R&D) sections written by Chinese PhD students and their writer identities reflected through metadiscourse choice. A corpus was built, consisting of a subcorpus of R&D of unpublished research articles (RAs) written by Chinese PhD students (CNWs) and one of the same part-genre by English-speaking expert writers (EEWs). Metadiscourse used by the two groups were identified based on Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse. Quantitative analyses on the frequency and variety of metadiscourse markers found a significant difference not only in interactional metadiscourse but also in some subcategories of interactive and interactional metadiscourse, indicating that CNWs attach more importance to organisation of ideas than to the persuasiveness of arguments. A questionnaire survey was conducted to explore the influence of the CNWs’ perception of RA writing on their metadiscourse choice. It revealed that knowledge of generic conventions and metadiscourse functions, awareness of the writer–reader relationship, and confidence in language competence may influence metadiscourse choice. The paper concludes with the view that the CNWs generally view themselves as a recounter and reporter of their research, remaining conservative when presenting an authoritative voice and a confident identity as a knowledge creator.
... Kawase (2015) analyzed the introduction section of doctoral dissertations and the RAs only to find that metadiscourse and metatext are used more in doctoral dissertations than in research articles. In their latest study, Morton and Storch (2019) investigated the use of metadiscourse in two sets of doctoral writing of the two crucial times, the beginning and the end Table 1 Typical previous studies on metadiscourse in doctoral dissertation genre ...
... Author, year Approach Swales (1990) Assessing the use of commentary through close reading of the text Bunton (1999) Assessing the textual (interactive) level of metadiscourse Hyland (2004b), Hyland (2010), Hyland and Tse (2004) Assessing interactional and interactive metadiscourse P. Thompson (2012) Discovering voice of authority in doctoral dissertations through citation practices Kawase (2015) Assessing interactional and interactive metadiscourse Morton and Storch (2019) Investigation of authorial voice in doctoral candidates' literature review Peng (2018) Investigation of authorial voice in citation practices of doctoral dissertations' literature review El-Dakhs (2018) Assessing metadiscoursal variations in abstracts of doctoral dissertations and research articles genres of doctoral study. They focused on the perceptions of five supervisors regarding the voice in their doctoral student writing on the one hand and the development of authorial voice in their doctoral candidates' writing on the other. ...
Article
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This study explores the diachronic evolution of doctoral dissertation writing in terms of interactive and interactional metadiscourse at three time intervals of 1966, 1986, and 2016 through examining the salient textual features and the pattern of change involved in the metadiscourse in question. One hundred and eighty authentic doctoral dissertations were retrieved from humanities and social sciences (HSS) and sciences and engineering (SE) which generated a 5.16 million words corpus. Findings show that metadiscourse has considerably increased for SE and drastically decreased for HSS. Therefore, it is claimed that academic writing tends to be moving toward more objective and audience responsible texts in HSS and less objective and more author responsible texts in SE. This suggests that the former is inclined to get less persuasive and reader-oriented while the latter appears to be more persuasive and reader-friendly. Based on the findings, a theoretical model of academic writing evolution is proposed which focuses on three writing aspects, namely, informality and subjectivity, reader-orientedness and persuasiveness in the hope of offering implications for better understanding and constructing academic writing across disciplines.
... The rubric was developed and validated in a multi-phase mixed-method study and has since been used in multiple other empirical studies investigating voice-related issues in L2 writing (e.g. Crosthwaite and Jiang 2017;Yoon 2017;Zhao 2017Zhao , 2019Lim 2019;Morton and Storch 2019;Zhao and Wu 2022). ...
Article
Authorial voice is often identified as a key trait of successful writing in English rhetoric and composition, leading to research on its construction, development, and assessment in various types of written texts. Using Hyland’s (2008) interactional metadiscourse framework, existing studies have also examined the use of particular voice-related element(s) across different writer groups. Few, however, have examined how L2 writers may construct voice similarly or differently in their L1 and L2 writing. The present study therefore examined voice strength and voicing strategies in L1-Chinese and L2-English essays composed by the same group of Chinese EFL writers. Paired samples t-test showed, surprisingly, that writers’ L2-English voice was significantly stronger than their L1-Chinese voice, whereas subsequent text analysis of L1 and L2 writing samples further revealed differing linguistic, rhetorical, and discoursal resources employed by writers for voice construction when writing in two different language systems. Such findings extend Hyland’s (2008) interactional metadiscourse framework on voice construction and offer important implications for L2 writing instruction and assessment.
... To conform to what higher education demands, argumentative writing has been used as a central component of university writing since it manifests the students' voices in realizing their academic dynamic by negotiating their individual and socioculturally-affected voices (Morton & Storch, 2019). EFL classrooms worldwide have incorporated the need to advance their English courses at universities by involving argumentative essay writing as it is a fundamental learning skill, where students share knowledge and construct understandings through social constructivism (Aldridge et al., 2000;Mercer, 2005;Vygotsky, 1978) even though to write is the most difficult skill to master for the EFL students regardless of how long they have studies their English (Phuket & Othman, 2015). ...
Article
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This study explores first-year undergraduate students’ argumentation essays using argument diagramming structure. A corpus-driven data of 394 argumentative essays were gathered from both Indonesian and Thai universities. A content analysis was employed to examine the dataset of the students’ argumentative essays. After gathering primary information from the body parts of their essays, we subcategorized their argumentations into claims and premises in a compliant reading. To ensure data trustworthiness, this study employed triangulation by source and method. The findings show that the most prominent type of argument diagramming was a basic argument, followed by convergent and divergent arguments. Regardless of how the argument diagramming was written, the study found that the students still lacked mastery in structuring their logic when building up the case to be extended to claims and premises. This study suggests a need to revisit pedagogical instructions, in which there should be a provision not only on the basic knowledge of argument structures but also on the skills to recognize the quality of a good argument cognitively. This additional practice will provide important insights to recognize the representational strengths and weaknesses of the students’ argumentative writing proficiency to achieve a better performance in the content of their essays.
... As Mckinely (2017) argues, learners face numerous challenges when learning academic writing in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. For instance, most university students encounter difficulties in receiving not sufficient advice and guidance on using metadiscourse markers or possibly evaluative expressions (Morton & Storch, 2018). To be more exact, EFL postgraduates appear to struggle with academic writing (Almatarneh et al., 2018;Jomaa & Bidin, 2016) in terms of adopting a position and expressing their voice. ...
Article
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This study examines the frequency and pedagogical approaches of transition markers in three Iranian and three corresponding foreign English for Academic Purposes (EAP) grammar textbooks. Employing Hyland's (2005) interpersonal metadiscourse model, this research discerns the prevalence of transition markers, specifically focusing on indicators of addition, comparison and contrast, and consequence. A close analysis of the pedagogical dimension of transitions is conducted through the application of Walkova's (2020) ten principles. The findings showed that transitions of addition manifest the highest prevalence, while those of consequence emerge as the least prevalent category in both Iranian and foreign textbooks. Moreover, transitions appeared more significantly in Iranian textbooks than in foreign textbooks. However, the textbooks examined universally display a dearth of demonstrable commitment toward effective principles for instructing transitions. In spite of less frequent usage of transitions within their context, foreign textbooks evince a comparatively higher propensity for implementing the principles of effective instruction of transition than Iranian textbooks. The results of Chi-square tests indicate statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) across all three categories. The findings of this study strongly advocate that material developers and curriculum designers embrace the recommended principles for teaching transition markers.
... Such a perspective recognizes the unique discourse conventions and communicative goals of different disciplines and involves looking at academic writing practices and features through the lens of the norms, expectations, and traditions of specific disciplines. Indeed, research from this perspective has argued that the development of voice takes place within disciplines (Morton & Storch, 2018) and that the analysis of voice construction in specific disciplines sheds useful light on how "intellectual and epistemological features interact with social structures" (Hammarfelt, 2020, p. 253) embodied by disciplinary discourse communities (Becher & Trowler, 2001). Many studies have investigated disciplinary variation in academic voice construction from a synchronic perspective. ...
... 122). In a study by Morton and Storch (2019), supervisors commented on features related to the use of sources, as for example "ability to marshal information from sources in a way that goes beyond that sort of dutiful listing of things" (p. 20). ...
Article
While referencing is an important feature of academic writing, many students struggle with using sources. This struggle seems to be due, in part, to the tension students experience when advised to cite sources (i.e., others’ voices) on the one hand, and to demonstrate their own disciplinary voice on the other hand. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of source use, presenting a figure that illustrates gradients of students’ engagement with sources in various sections of their bachelor’s theses. Based on Bakhtin’s idea that a writer’s voice gradually emerges out of others’ words, and the terms knowledge telling and knowledge transforming, we developed a continuum that might help to understand the complexity of source use. We arrived at this continuum through the qualitative exploration of students’ use of sources in 15 bachelor’s theses from the humanities in one Norwegian university. In this article, we illustrate the continuum through extracts from the students’ theses, showing how issues of voice are intertwined with students’ engagement with sources. We propose that understanding the various functions of sources as they are typically used in the disciplines will help students to develop and demonstrate their disciplinary voices. Moreover, the continuum provides a foundation for fruitful discussions of writing practices that raise critical awareness about implicit expectations concerning source use and issues of voice in academic writing.
... Their study revealed that such rhetorical shifts are common in Discussion sections and require varied combinations of linguistic mechanisms. Like the other strands of research about authorial evaluation, such as stance, metadiscourse, and appraisal (Xie, 2020), voice is a socially defined trait that even expert PhD dissertation advisers may struggle to identify consistently in their students' writing (Morton & Storch, 2019). Studies that describe and demystify the textual and functional elements contributing to authorial voice are therefore valuable for students and teachers alike. ...
Article
Acknowledging limitations and making recommendations for future research are often presented in thesis handbooks and rubrics as obligatory moves that demonstrate an author’s critical self- evaluation and authority. Published research articles (RAs), however, reflect nuanced variation that challenges this interpretation. Based on two specialized corpora of 100 quantitative and 100 qualitative RAs from four applied linguistics journals, this mixed methods study combines genre analysis, which highlighted the relative prominence of these moves across methodological approaches and journals, and p-frame analysis, which generated a list of linguistic frames with one or more variable slots (e.g., it is important to * (note/mention/realize)) that emphasize flexibility within formulaic language structures. The results indicate that both moves are quasi-obligatory but vary considerably across methodologies and journals. EAP instructors might use genre analysis to evaluate rhetorical moves and steps together with students and to discuss ways to incorporate variety in academic writing using the list of p-frames identified in this study.
... The major rationale for the choice of the two groups links directly to work done into academic literacy (e.g., Lillis et al., 2015;Morton & Storch, 2019) which asserts that students, teachers and researchers in one broad discipline have contrasting understandings of authorial voice. The PhD supervisors from these studies found the task of recognizing and defining voice in the students' texts very challenging. ...
Article
The pressure to publish in scholarly journals has been increasingly pervading doctoral education worldwide and has become a high-stakes activity for any novice writer who wishes to pursue an academic career. In this manuscript, we explore how doctoral students of management from Eastern Europe identify and evaluate authorial voice and compare their perceptions with those of established academics. Perceptions of authorial voice, as manifested in conclusions to six articles published in top-tier management journals, were collected from 24 students and six academics, and analyzed from their responses to a questionnaire. The study highlighted differences in what these groups considered as the rhetorical nature of a convincing authorial voice. The examination of students’ perceptions was expanded through interviews which revealed that for this group, a reader-considerate voice is essential for a text to be convincing. To enable novice academics’ visibility and participation in their discipline’s global discourse community, we provide a compelling case for de-emphasizing the methodological and theoretical soundness (“rigor”) in reporting scholarly work and prioritizing the effective communication of meaningful and practical research (“relevance”). It is also argued that the provision of strategic writing instruction at graduate level will help achieve this goal.
... Additionally, our data hint at a relationship between regulation processes and participants' positions as researchers, understood as an individual's attributes and conceptions about research (which may also be visible in the text through the writer's voice) and as the place the individual occupies in relation to other researchers, research groups and communities (Lave & Wenger, 1991;Kamler, 2008;Prior & Bilbro, 2012;Morton & Storch, 2019). That relationship can be traced when connecting students' perceived strengths and weaknesses as writers with their writing regulation processes. ...
... Additionally, our data hint at a relationship between regulation processes and participants' positions as researchers, understood as an individual's attributes and conceptions about research (which may also be visible in the text through the writer's voice) and as the place the individual occupies in relation to other researchers, research groups and communities (Lave & Wenger, 1991;Kamler, 2008;Prior & Bilbro, 2012;Morton & Storch, 2019). That relationship can be traced when connecting students' perceived strengths and weaknesses as writers with their writing regulation processes. ...
Book
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Writing As a Human Activity offers a collection of original essays that attempt to account for Charles Bazerman’s shaping influence on the field of writing studies. Through scholarly engagement with his ideas, the 16 chapters—written by authors from Asia, Europe, North America, and South America—address Bazerman’s foundational scholarship on academic and scientific writing, genre theory, activity theory, writing research, writing across the curriculum, writing pedagogy, the sociology of knowledge, new media and technology, and international aspects of writing. Collectively, the authors use Bazerman’s work as a touchstone to consider contemporary contexts of writing as a human activity.
... Foreign graduates encountered difficulties in scientific writing due to the absence of motivation in research and the lack of time allocated to students by advisors. (Morton & Storch, 2019). As (see , Table 4), item 5, (mean 4.16), "I feel it is difficult to write a scientific research paper." ...
Article
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Every year millions of students travel to other countries to pursue their dreams of becoming skilled and knowledgeable professionals with expertise. However, they have to face some challenges and difficulties during studying abroad. The current study aimed to examine and identify the academic problems faced by foreign postgraduates while studying at Chinese universities in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Further, this study also aimed to identify various levels of academic problems and put forward possible recommendations and solutions that help international postgraduates cope with difficulties in their studies. Data was collected through a questionnaire survey from the 493 international postgraduates studying in six public sector universities located in different parts of Wuhan. Using the SPSS 24 version and Principle Component Factor Analysis method, the study found that foreign postgraduates encounter academic problems and difficulties, 30.25%, 12.04%, 8.21%, perceived scientific research writing, teaching & learning, and perceived student-supervisor interaction. Also, 5.07% and 4.47% of the perceived major courses and academic activities. The study finds that foreign postgraduates studying in Wuhan, China expressing their significant concerns, are scientific research writing issues, the teaching system, lack of student-supervisor interaction, language barrier, and fewer course selection options. Based on the result, the study suggested that focusing on scientific writing skills, increasing interaction with supervisors, offering more English programs, increasing English teaching faculty, and arranging academic seminars and workshops can effectively reduce students’ academic problems in Chinese universities. Possible solutions, limitations and future research directions have been discussed.
... Qualitative research has examined language used by schoolaged children in science writing, such as de Oliveira and Lan's (2014) case study and how it relates to classroom interaction. Morton and Storch (2019) focused on how graduate L2 students conveyed voice through interviews with faculty about student writing. While their scope of inquiry was broad, they included a discussion of specific linguistic features that were or could be used in relation to faculty perceptions of voice. ...
Chapter
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This chapter explores the extent to which communicative competence, a construct rarely invoked in second language (L2) writing literature, may serve as a goal for learners and thus help practitioners and researchers identify gaps in the literature. The components of communicative competence are reviewed in relation to writing, highlighting both how they have been previously understood and how they may be construed slightly differently when investigating L2 writing. The chapter presents a historical perspective that seeks to account for the relative lack of attention given to communicative competence in L2 writing research, despite its prevalence in language teaching and teaching methods classes. Three critical issues are then identified and discussed. Communicative competence is explored as a tool (1) to address the ongoing debate about the balance of language and genre in language instruction, especially in relation to multimodal composing; (2) to develop strategic competence in writing, a topic rarely explicitly addressed; and (3) to contribute to current debates in assessing writing. The chapter concludes with an overview of research methods that have been used to examine the various components of communicative competence, along with recommendations for how L2 writing researchers and practitioners may further their work with communicative competence in mind.
... According to Hyland (2008), the use of we is very important as it communicates to readers that the point of view of the authors is authentic and they believe in their claims. Morton and Storch (2019) reveal that the use of we is better than I. From extract 13, the use of we establishes a closeness between the authors and their construed readers in their academic discipline. The third-person singular pronoun was also recorded. ...
Article
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Genre studies have contributed to revealing the communicative purposes and structural properties particular to specific discourse communities. Research articles (RA) have been the focus of most genre studies for the past four decades. RA abstract is important because it summarizes the work, persuades readers, and ‘sells’ the article locally and internationally. An emerging academic discipline that has been under studied is Biostatistics. The study aimed at exploring the move structure and lexico-grammatical features of RA abstracts published in Biostatistics. Forty (40) RA abstracts were extracted from four different Biostatistics journals. Hyland’s five-move structure model was adopted to guide the analysis. Using Hüttner’s classification model, the most frequent move was the Product, with a 100% occurrence. While the Introduction move was core, the Purpose, Method, Product and Conclusion moves were obligatory. It was revealed that the abstracts follow the completely linear five-move structure, i.e., M1>M2>M3>M4>M5. While the study revealed that the total number of words in an abstract is 244, the Product move had the highest textual space in the abstract. With the linguistic realisation of the moves, the past verb tense was preferred, occurring frequently in the Method move. The Introduction and Conclusion moves recorded frequent use of modal verbs. Personal pronouns were characteristic of the Method move. These linguistic realisations served to differentiate one move from the others. While the study contributes to research on RA abstracts generally, it guides the practice of abstract designing in Biostatistics. Finally, it offers insights for further research.
... .a profound rhetorical, linguistic, intellectual, emotional, and psychological challenge" (Paré 2019, p. 81), and the writing process is central to these challenges (Russell-Pinson & Harris, 2019). Particular issues that doctoral students face in their writing journeys are developing creativity ; see also Thurlow, Chapter 5 this collection), forming an authorial voice (Morton & Storch, 2019), managing emotions and time (Straforini, 2015), negotiating the tension between conventionality and innovation Weatherall, 2019), and making changes to their identity as scholars and writers Mu et al., 2019). The turn to fiction provides a way to confront these issues by creating writing that is humanized and personalized through playful and collaborative engagement as a practice of the exploration of thought. ...
... .a profound rhetorical, linguistic, intellectual, emotional, and psychological challenge" (Paré 2019, p. 81), and the writing process is central to these challenges (Russell-Pinson & Harris, 2019). Particular issues that doctoral students face in their writing journeys are developing creativity ; see also Thurlow, Chapter 5 this collection), forming an authorial voice (Morton & Storch, 2019), managing emotions and time (Straforini, 2015), negotiating the tension between conventionality and innovation Weatherall, 2019), and making changes to their identity as scholars and writers Mu et al., 2019). The turn to fiction provides a way to confront these issues by creating writing that is humanized and personalized through playful and collaborative engagement as a practice of the exploration of thought. ...
Chapter
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A conclusion often entails providing answers derived from questions like “What does all this mean?” and “What do we now know about the topic we did not know before?” While conventionally appealing, these questions become redundant within a feminist new materialist approach, as they are premised on a separation between the knower (research- er) and the known (subject/s). This chapter explores tensions that emerge between ontological foundations of research and thesis writing conventions, such as a tidy conclusion. Drawing on Karen Barad’s (2007) concepts of onto-epistem-ology and intra-action, I consider how a new materialist ontology re- configures binary concepts such as question/answer, research/ researcher, and knowing/not knowing. These binary concepts often underpin the conclusions a thesis offers, along with doctoral framings of success and failure. The chapter ponders questions that emerge for re-imagining doctoral writing when binaries are blurred. You can find the book here: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/international/doctoral/
... .a profound rhetorical, linguistic, intellectual, emotional, and psychological challenge" (Paré 2019, p. 81), and the writing process is central to these challenges (Russell-Pinson & Harris, 2019). Particular issues that doctoral students face in their writing journeys are developing creativity ; see also Thurlow, Chapter 5 this collection), forming an authorial voice (Morton & Storch, 2019), managing emotions and time (Straforini, 2015), negotiating the tension between conventionality and innovation Weatherall, 2019), and making changes to their identity as scholars and writers Mu et al., 2019). The turn to fiction provides a way to confront these issues by creating writing that is humanized and personalized through playful and collaborative engagement as a practice of the exploration of thought. ...
Book
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Re-imagining Doctoral Writing Edited by Cecile Badenhorst, Brittany Amell, and James Burford Copy edited by Karen Peirce. Designed by Mike Palmquist. CoverWhat imaginings of the doctoral writer circulate in the talk of doctoral researchers and their supervisors? How do institutional policies and the conventions of particular disciplines shape the ways in which doctoral writing is imagined? Why, and in what ways, has doctoral writing been re-imagined in the twenty-first century? What future imaginings of doctoral writing may be hovering on the horizon? This edited collection has gathered a diverse group of authors—from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa, the UK, Denmark, Canada, and the US—to consider these challenging questions during a time in which doctoral education is undergoing enormous transformation. Together, the contributors to this collection explore how the practice of doctoral writing is entangled with broader concerns within doctoral education, including attrition, timeliness, the quality of supervision, the transferability of knowledge and skills to industry settings, research impact, research integrity, and the decolonization of the doctorate. You can find the book here: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/international/doctoral/
Article
This paper presents a mixed-method study that integrates genre-based corpus analysis and discourse-based interviews to examine the form- and stance-related citation patterns in the research articles of ten first- and second-year engineering doctoral students. The corpus analysis reveals strong preferences for stance-marked citations and the proclaim and entertain devices in particular, suggesting that writers use authorial stance to endorse cited propositions or provide likelihood- or evidence-based judgments in citations. Interview results indicate a discordance between writers’ intentions and their stance-related linguistic choices, as well as varied perceptions of authorial stance. Despite the frequent use of stance markers in citations, most writers claimed to be neutral reporters of knowledge. Only a few acknowledged their strategic stance choices and demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the rhetorical roles citations play in their claim-making practices. The findings suggest that students with developing citation expertise lacked the academic and disciplinary expertise to understand the interplay among citations, authorial stance, and rhetorical move/step structures in their research writing. These writers could benefit from explicit feedback that raises their awareness of the strategic use of citations and stance, to facilitate the realization of rhetorical goals in research writing.
Article
В рамках научного дискурса статья занимает центральное место в конструировании и распространении знаний в научном сообществе. При этом коллаборативное авторство приобретает все более широкое распространение в научной среде. Синтаксические и семантические различия между текстами коллабораций и индивидуальных авторов представляют актуальную проблему и остаются малоизученными. Этим определяется цель исследования – выявление различий в структуре научного дискурса при индивидуальном и коллаборативном авторстве публикаций. На предварительном этапе исследования было проведено неструктурированное исследовательское интервью об особенностях написания научных статей индивидуально и в составе авторских коллективов. Основное исследование посвящено анализу семантико-синтаксической структуры текстов с помощью метода реляционно-ситуационного анализа (РСА), позволяющего автоматически выявлять соответствие синтаксемной структуры предложения логической структуре действий, описанных в этом предложении. В ходе исследования сопоставлялись тексты 201 научной статьи на русском языке из ведущих психологических журналов, входящих в WoS и Scopus, разбитые на корпуса по типу авторства (индивидуальное-коллаборативное) и жанрам (теоретические статьи и обзоры vs эмпирических методических статей). В ходе исследования было выявлено, что в статьях, написанных в соавторстве выше лексическая связность, они более синтаксически корректны. Объем текста научной статьи по психологии в среднем на 9% больше при индивидуальном авторстве по сравнению с коллаборативным написанием. Семантико-синтаксические различия текстов статей индивидуальных авторов и коллабораций имеют жанровую дифференциацию. В теоретических статьях и обзорах коллабораций выше синтаксическая сложность и смысловая связанность текста, при этом превалирует традиционная структура высказывания: кратко постулируется тезис и затем развернуто обосновывается. При индивидуальном авторстве основная идея чаще формулируется после контекста, при этом в текстах отдельных авторов чаще используется переформулирование. Метадискурс в этом жанре также существенно различается: авторская позиция в большей степени представлена у индивидуальных авторов, а «вовлечение читателя» - в случае соавторства. В эмпирических и методических статьях основные различия выявлены в специфике метадискурса: авторская позиция, в отличии от жанра теоретических статей, в большей степени присуща текстам коллабораций. Within the framework of scientific discourse, the article occupies a central place in the construction and dissemination of knowledge in the scientific community. At the same time, collaborative authorship is becoming increasingly widespread in the scientific community. The syntactic and semantic differences between the texts of collaborations and individual authors present an urgent problem and remain poorly understood. This determines the purpose of the study — to identify differences in the structure of scientific discourse with individual and collaborative authorship of publications. At the preliminary stage of the study, an unstructured research interview was conducted on the specifics of writing scientific articles individually and as part of author teams. The main research is devoted to the analysis of the semantic and syntactic structure of texts using the method of relational situational analysis (RSA), which allows you to automatically identify the correspondence of the syntaxemic structure of a sentence to the logical structure of the actions described in this sentence. The study compared the texts of 201 scientific articles in Russian from the leading psychological journals included in WoS and Scopus, divided into corpora by type of authorship (individual-collaborative) and genres (theoretical articles and reviews vs empirical methodological articles). During the study, it was revealed that the articles written in collaboration have higher lexical coherence, they are more syntactically correct. The volume of the text of a scientific article on psychology is on average 9% more with individual authorship compared with collaborative writing. The semantic and syntactic differences between the texts of articles by individual authors and collaborations have a genre differentiation. In theoretical articles and reviews of collaborations, the syntactic complexity and semantic coherence of the text are higher, the traditional structure of the statement prevails: the thesis is briefly postulated and then fully justified. With individual authorship, the main idea is more often formulated after the context, while reformulation is more often used in the texts of individual authors. The meta-discourse in theoretical articles also differs significantly: the author’s position is more represented by individual authors, and “reader involvement” is in the case of co-authorship. In empirical and methodological articles, the main differences are revealed in the specifics of meta-discourse: the author’s position, unlike the genre of theoretical articles, is more inherent in the texts of collaborations.
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Academic writing not only conveys academic content but also represents the authorial identity, serving as a means of presenting one’s identity. Writers utilize various linguistic resources to present different possibilities of self, such as intertextuality, thereby constructing their authorial identity. This study examines the Chinese EFL learners’ construction of authorial identity in academic writing from an intertextuality perspective. This study adopts a mixed method, utilizing interviews and written texts as data sources. Results were found that novice writers primarily construct their identities through the practices of direct intertextuality during the initial stages of identity construction. As novice writers gain more experience through extensive reading and writing practices, as well as academic writing courses, their intertextuality practices undergo a transformation. They begin to shift from direct intertextuality to indirect intertextuality, aiming to express their own conceptions, attempting to be like a “scholar” through indirect intertextuality. The study highlights the importance of intertextuality in the construction of academic writing identity for EFL learners. By understanding the interplay between intertextuality and authorial identity, educators can better assist EFL learners in achieving success in their academic writing endeavors.
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Authorial voice is considered to be the representation of a writer's point of view or stance toward the propositions they adduce within a manuscript. This case study examines the reader's role in constructing authorial voice in scientific writing in the natural sciences. The study focuses on six scientists with varying degrees of professional experience from different natural sciences disciplines and their perceptions of authorial voice as readers. Their perceptions, derived from triangulation of multiple data sources, are contrasted in this study. Overall, our results illustrate a complex phenomenon in the way in which authorial voice is constructed, highlighting that natural scientists' voice construction—their revoicing processes as readers—is linked to their degree of professional experience, their expected roles and positions, and the beliefs, values, and assumptions that might have been shaped through their previous experiences and training.
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Background and research aims Since scholarly texts on management have been criticised as being no longer effective in communicating today's changing sociocultural, disciplinary, and practical contexts, my purpose in this paper is to conceptualise the identity options management authors can assume to communicate disciplinary knowledge and beliefs. Theoretical perspective The theoretical perspectives involved in this analysis include selected aspects of Harré and van Langenhove's (1999) positioning theory that I linked with my model of writer identity as a trichotomy of selves (individual self, collective self, depersonalised self), textually conveyed in the three types of voice (Lehman, 2018; Lehman and Sułkowski, 2020). Key findings Based on this conceptual framework, specific advice is provided as to how academics can create a reader-inclusive or authoritative writer persona in their texts. In doing so, I support the recent efforts in Critical Management Studies (CMS) to ‘write differently’ in order to address the aesthetic, moral, and political concerns of writing in the field.
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This article extends the dialogue about the way international doctoral students are positioned by the Western point of reference, exploring an internal conflict experienced by a doctoral student when negotiating his religious epistemological point of view. The paper amplifies the dialogue in three ways: first by acknowledging other epistemological traditions within education and research, second by understanding the complexities of self-epistemological negotiations, and finally, by unveiling the fact that a researcher’s epistemological standpoint might not be fully represented. I do this by revealing the shifts of my research paradigms throughout my doctoral journey. I conclude that my research paradigm shifts are a form of ‘epistemological fetishism’ – a concept inspired by Marx’s commodity fetishism. This epistemological fetishism unveils the fracture of epistemological representation in research.
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With the growth of English medium instruction (EMI) on a global level, the number of multilingual students writing their master’s theses in English is increasing. However, research on students’ experiences of writing them in English in non-English speaking contexts is scarce. This paper reports on the challenges and strategic learning efforts of eight Kazakhstani students while working on their master’s thesis projects in a Kazakhstani EMI university. The qualitative data collected from a written narrative and three subsequent semi-structured interviews revealed that almost all the participants had a clear preference for a directive supervision style, whereby supervisors give stage-by-stage guidance. The result was a clash of expectations, miscommunication and confusion between supervisors and supervisees in some cases, especially since most supervisors come from English-speaking countries. Two participants, however, favoured a laissez-faire supervisory style where the supervisor orchestrated their supervisees’ learning efforts implicitly by giving them room to work independently. All participants also articulated certain effective strategies to confront the diverse challenges associated with constructing a new identity for themselves as researchers, time management, and ‘imposter syndrome’. From this qualitative study, practical recommendations for developing the effectiveness (quality) of master’s thesis supervision in EMI universities are made.
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Authorial voice is now acknowledged as an important aspect of academic writing, but one that may be particularly challenging for multilingual students writing a thesis in English as an additional language (EAL). There is also an increasing volume of published advice on writing a thesis. Yet to date few studies have investigated whether the advice provided reflects recent ethnographically oriented research on voice and scholarly identity (e.g. Morton & Storch, Developing an authorial voice in PhD multilingual student writing: The reader’s perspective. Journal of Second Language Writing, 43(1), 15–23, 2019). In this chapter, we report on a study that analysed the advice provided by six thesis writing guidebooks and a range of online resources on authorial voice. We found an interesting distinction between guidebooks targeting students and those targeting supervisors, particularly in terms of the complexity with which voice was dealt, if at all.
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This chapter starts by recognising the complex issues involved for PhD and early career researchers having the confidence and courage to develop their academic voice. Expectations and norms exist within society and within the academic sector in terms of disciplinary and methodological expectations about good academic writing.
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This chapter progresses the student reflections to strategies and prescriptive guidance by firstly recognising that integrating voice into academic writing is a process that cn be both learned and taught. Some practical guidance and tips are included. The practical guidance recognises that finding a voice is a matter of taste and scholars themselves must eventually figure out what works for them and what does not.
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Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view toward the issues they discuss while anticipating readers’ imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the past three decades. Recognizing that academic writing is less objective and “author evacuated” than Geertz and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers. Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this article we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years.
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While researchers have long pointed to the "incomplete information" accompanying various parts of the research article (Latour & Woolgar 1979, Gilbert & Mulkay 1984, Lynch 1985, Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995), silences surrounding the research account have been gaining the explicit attention of discourse analysts only recently (Huckin 1997, 2002, Dressen 1998, Swales 1998, 1999). Recent work has shown that textual silence abounds in academic disciplines such as geology, where most details from the fieldwork mission seem to disappear from the published account (Dressen & Swales 2000, Dressen 2002). Indeed, a number of diachronic studies have demonstrated an increase in authorial discretion in the research ac-count over the past 150-200 years (Bazerman 1988, Salager-Meyer 2000), and in this, geol-ogy is no exception. In order to identify and explain textual silence in modern geological field reporting, this study undertakes a situated genre analysis of a corpus of 103 recent articles (1995-1999) from three subdisciplines in geology. As a socio-historical analysis, it establishes the place the practice of fieldwork has come to occupy in the geological research community over time. A linguistic analysis of the corpus then identifies a specific Field Account part-genre in the geology research article, and further reveals the linguistic and rhetorical strategies by which authors may discreetly give details of their fieldwork and work to establish their credi-bility and field competence (Rudwick 1985). Which field details are considered communally relevant is next determined through the analysis of the various "recontextualizations" (Linell 1998) of one field study, through the convention-driven distillation of the study's field re-sults. The appropriateness and relevancy of field details is further established through a series of text-based interviews with three expert geologists. Here, using Bourdieu (1984) and Engeström (1987), we see how the researcher-writer maneuvers between "the said" and "the unsaid" in each text instantiation, taken as a site of need-based and innovational interaction between individual actors, the collectivity, and the institution. Finally, a discussion of the implications for training junior geologists in research writing closes the study.
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One of the characteristics of writing is that it does not carry the phonetic and prosodic qualities of speech. We will argue, however, that the lexical, syntactic, organizational, and even the material aspects of writing construct identity just as much as do the phonetic and prosodic aspects of speech, and thus writing always conveys a representation of the self of the writer. In this sense, “voice” is not an optional extra: All writing contains “voice” in the Bakhtinian sense of reaccentuating “voice types,” which locate their users culturally and historically. Writers may, through the linguistic and other resources they choose to draw upon in their writing, ventriloquate an environmentally aware voice, a progressive-educator voice, a sexist voice, a positivist voice, a self-assured voice, a deferential voice, a committed-to-plain-English voice, or a combination of an infinite number of such voices. We will illustrate this argument with examples from the writing of six graduate students studying in British universities. We will recommend that an L2 writing pedagogy that raises critical awareness about voice can help learners maintain control over the personal and cultural identity they are projecting in their writing.
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Research to date on the examination process for postgraduate research theses has focused largely on the deconstruction of examiners' reports. This article reports on a study of the processes that experienced examiners go through, and the judgements they make before writing their reports. A sample of 30 experienced examiners (de ned as having examined the equivalent of at least ve research theses over the last ve years), from a range of disciplines in ve universities was interviewed. Clear trends emerged with regard to: the criteria used by examiners and the levels of student performance expected by them; critical judgement points in the examination process; the examiners' perceptions of their own role in the process; the in uence on examiners of previously published work, the views of the other examiner(s) and their knowledge of the student's supervisor and/or department, and the level of perceived responsibility between student and supervisor.
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This article critically explores the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing. Drawing on data from two longitudinal studies, student writing in the United Kingdom and professional academic writing in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, the author illustrates the different contributions ethnography can make to researching academic writing, depending on the level at which it is construed, as method, methodology, or "deep theorizing." In discussing the third level of ethnography, the author draws on recent debates around linguistic ethnography to explore how ethnography as deep theorizing can contribute to refining social practice accounts of academic writing through the specific notions of indexicality and orientation. By working through three levels of ethnography, her aim is to signal the ontological gap between text and context in academic writing research and to open up debate about how this gap can be narrowed.
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Focusing on the introductions to research articles in a variety of disciplines, the author uses appraisal theory to analyze how writers bring together multiple resources to develop their positions in the flow of discourse. It will be most useful for researchers new to appraisal, and to EAP teachers.
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The need to establish an authorial identity in academic discourse has been considered to be critical for all doctoral students by academic writing teachers and researchers for some time. For students for whom English is an additional language (EAL) in particular, the challenges are not only how to communicate this identity effectively in English, but also how to develop from a writer who simply ventriloquizes the voices of scholarly others to an author who writes with authority and discipline-specific rhetorical knowledge. In the current project, we explored how three EAL students constructed authorial voices through the use of personal and impersonal forms of self-representation and evaluative stance in the Introduction sections of their written PhD Confirmation Reports. Our findings indicate that students combined a complex range of linguistic and rhetorical resources, such as integral and non-integral attribution of sources and attitudinal markers of stance, in their quest to project credible authorial identities as Applied Linguists. We also discovered the effect of these resources on readers to be cumulative. We recommend further research, including interviews with students, supervisors and examiners from across the disciplines, to explore and extend the scope of the present study.
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Research on authorial identity has focused almost exclusively on the attitudes and beliefs of students. This paper explores how academics understand authorial identity in higher education. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with professional academics and analysed using thematic analysis, identifying themes at two levels. At the semantic level was a main theme called ‘the authorial writer’, with five subthemes: ‘authorial confidence’, ‘valuing writing’, ‘ownership and attachment’, ‘authorial thinking’, and ‘authorial goals’. At the latent level were two integrative themes: ‘tacit learning’ and ‘negotiating identities’. The semantic subthemes represent attributes that could be targets for pedagogic interventions. The integrative themes suggest processes in the development of authorial identity, which can inform more effective teaching. By identifying attributes and processes associated with authorial identity, these findings help towards a psychological understanding of authorial identity, informing development of more effective pedagogy to help students improve their academic writing and avoid plagiarism.
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The doctoral thesis is the highest form of assessed student writing in the sphere of British higher education. While it can vary greatly in form, tone, epistemology and purpose across disciplines, which makes it difficult to generalize features, a common point is that candidates have to be persuasive. To convince examiners that they are worthy of the award of a doctorate, their texts need to meet a twofold rhetorical challenge: firstly, they must project a voice of individual expert authority through the developing text, and, secondly, they must also position themselves in relation to their thesis subject and ultimately within a disciplinary community. They must, in sum, achieve both a distinct voice and a distinct stance. In this chapter I will discuss notions of voice and stance in relation to PhD theses, adopting the broad definition of ‘voice’ put forward by Matsuda (2001: 40): ‘Voice is the amalgamative effect of the use of discursive and non-discursive features that language users choose, deliberately or otherwise, from socially available yet everchanging repertoires; it is the overall impression.’ In other words, ‘voice’ derives from a range of aspects of the text, both linguistic and non-linguistic.
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The term voice is frequently used in current writing research. This review gives an overview of empirical studies which aimed to identify voice features in academic texts written by students and/or professional writers. The purpose of this article is to show how the understanding of voice and the aims and approaches used in the studies are intertwined. Many studies build on Hyland’s (2008) interactional model which has contributed to insights into voice-related issues in academic writing. However, the overemphasis on linguistic features, such as the use of first person pronouns, entails the risk that research on voice ignores content-related features that might be more relevant in the construction of voice. In addition, this review emphasizes the need to relate voice features to the specific context where the writing occurs. The reader-based approach used in the studies by Matsuda and Tardy (Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Tardy & Matsuda, 2009) or the combination of different methodological tools, as used by Dressen-Hammouda (2014), allows taking into account contextual aspects such as the insider knowledge of the disciplinary community and/or the genre, thus demonstrating how the writer's voice is always embedded in ways of knowledge making and writing traditions.
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Researchers who adopt ethnographic perspectives aim to gain insiders’ perspectives on writers’ experiences, writing practices, and the contexts in which academic texts are produced and assessed. Adopting a broad view of ethnographically oriented research, this book argues for the importance of this perspective in research into academic writing as a means of deepening understanding of the social influences on language use and individuals’ experiences in academic writing contexts. A range of academic writing contexts are examined, including undergraduate writing, postgraduate writing, writing for publication, and the learning and teaching of academic writing. Paltridge, Starfield and Tardy draw together work in the areas of English for academic purposes, academic literacies, genre studies, and writing in the disciplines in their examination of academic writing research. They discuss past and current examples of research which provide contextual understandings of academic writing so as to better understand not just what writers do, but also how and why they do it.
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Although a key concept in various writing textbooks, learning standards, and writing rubrics, voice remains a construct that is only loosely defined in the literature and impressionistically assessed in practice. Few attempts have been made to formally investigate whether and how the strength of an author's voice in written texts can be reliably measured. Using a mixed-method approach, this study develops and validates an analytic rubric that measures voice strength in second language (L2) argumentative writing. Factor analysis of ratings from six raters on voice strength in a total of 400 TOEFL (R) iBT writing samples, together with qualitative analysis of four raters' in-depth think-aloud and interview data, points to an alternative conceptualization of voice that sees authorial voice in written discourse as being realized primarily through the following dimensions: (1) the presence and clarity of ideas in the content; (2) the manner of the presentation of ideas; and (3) the writer and reader presence. Implications of such results for L2 writing instruction and assessment are discussed.
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Some researchers have argued that voice is irrelevant to academic writing and that the importance of voice has been overstated in the professional literature [Helms-Park, R., & Stapleton, P. (2003); Stapleton, P. (2002)]. To investigate whether and how a socially oriented notion of voice—defined as “the amalgamative effect of the use of discursive and non-discursive features that language users choose, deliberately or otherwise, from socially available yet ever-changing repertoires” [Matsuda, P.K. (2001)]—plays a role in academic writing, this study examined the construction of an author’s discursive identity by peer reviewers in a simulated blind manuscript review process for an academic journal in the field of rhetoric and composition. The analysis of the written reviews as well as interviews with the two reviewers and the manuscript author indicated that the reviewers’ constructions of the author’s voice are related to their stance toward the author. The findings suggest that voice does play a role in academic writing and that there is a need for further research into the issue of identity construction from the perspectives of both writers and readers.
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Despite the debate among writing researchers about its viability as a pedagogical tool in writing instruction [e.g., Helms-Park, R., & Stapleton, P. (2003). Questioning the importance of individualized voice in undergraduate L2 argumentative writing: An empirical study with pedagogical implications. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12 (3), 245–265; Stapleton, P. (2002). Critiquing voice as a viable pedagogical tool in L2 writing: Returning spotlight to ideas. Journal of Second Language Writing, 11 (3), 177–190], voice remains one of the constructs commonly addressed in learning standards and assessed in high-stakes English Language Arts tests. It is assumed, therefore, that the presence of a strong authorial voice plays an important role in the evaluation of the overall quality of students’ writing. In reality, however, there is a critical lack of empirical research that explores the nature and characteristics of the relationship between voice and overall writing quality. The present study builds on and extends the work of Helms-Park and Stapleton [Helms-Park, R., & Stapleton, P. (2003). Questioning the importance of individualized voice in undergraduate L2 argumentative writing: An empirical study with pedagogical implications. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12 (3), 245–265] and examines such a relationship in the context of an L1 high-stakes academic writing assessment. Results show a positive and significant relationship between voice intensity and writing quality, which contradicts what Helms-Park and Stapleton [Helms-Park, R., & Stapleton, P. (2003). Questioning the importance of individualized voice in undergraduate L2 argumentative writing: An empirical study with pedagogical implications. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12 (3), 245–265] found in the context of L2 argumentative writing. This study therefore contributes to the exploration of the role of voice in writing instruction and assessment.
Article
Academic writing is not just about conveying an ideational ‘content’, it is also about the representation of self. Recent research has suggested that academic prose is not completely impersonal, but that writers gain credibility by projecting an identity invested with individual authority, displaying confidence in their evaluations and commitment to their ideas. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of such an authorial identity is the use of first person pronouns and their corresponding determiners. But while the use of these forms are a powerful rhetorical strategy for emphasising a contribution, many second language writers feel uncomfortable using them because of their connotations of authority. In this paper I explore the notion of identity in L2 writing by examining the use of personal pronouns in 64 Hong Kong undergraduate theses, comparisons with a large corpus of research articles, and interviews with students and their supervisors. The study shows significant underuse of authorial reference by students and clear preferences for avoiding these forms in contexts which involved making arguments or claims. I conclude that the individualistic identity implied in the use of I may be problematic for many L2 writers.
Article
Within the now burgeoning literature on doctoral research education, postgraduate research supervision continues to be a problematical issue, practically and theoretically. This paper seeks to explore and understand supervision as a distinctive kind of pedagogic practice. Informed by a larger research project, it draws on poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, as well as educational inquiry, to investigate the manner in which postgraduate research supervision is to be grasped as fundamentally a ‘practice producing subjects’, as much implicated in the production of identity as in the production of knowledge. Focusing on the discursive relationship between supervision and subjectivity, it addresses what is described as important ‘unfinished business’ in the field. Specifically, it provides a set of scenes and stories of supervision, drawn from various sources, with a view to illuminating the psycho‐social dynamics of struggle, submission and subjectification, including the role and significance of fantasy, in the practice of postgraduate research pedagogy.
Article
The concept of voice has become central to studies of discourse, composition, and literature, but in this paper I want to shift its meaning a little to explore an area where voice is thought to play only a minor role: that of academic writing. I intend here to explore the idea of 'disciplinary voice' by focusing on the interpersonal features of academic writing and elaborating how writers position themselves and their readers. Essentially, I believe the idea of voice can shed light on aspects of disciplinary argument and am interested to see what these features tell us about writers' notions of appropriate relationships and what this means for writing in the disciplines. I will begin by looking briefly at the notion of voice, and go on to sketch an interactional model based on the ideas of stance, or how writers convey their attitudes and credibility, and engagement, or the ways they bring their readers into the discourse. I will then show how the choices writers make from these systems construct authorial voice, academic arguments, and the disciplines themselves.
Article
Academic writing has traditionally been thought of as a convention-bound monolithic entity that involves distant, convoluted and impersonal prose. However, recent research has suggested a growing recognition that there is room for negotiation of identity within academic writing, and thus academic writing need not be totally devoid of a writer’s presence. In this article, we explore the notion of writer identity in academic essays by focusing on first person pronouns, arguably the most visible manifestation of a writer’s presence in a text. Our main argument is that the first person pronoun in academic writing is not a homogeneous entity. Accordingly, we set up a typology of six different identities behind the first person pronoun in academic writing. We then apply this framework to a specific examination of the essays of 27 first-year undergraduates at the National University of Singapore. We focus on how the identities of these student writers are revealed through uses of the first person pronoun, and reflect on the implications of our results on issues of critical thinking and writing education at the tertiary level.
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While the study of written discourse that informs the field of L2 writing has generated many insights into its generalizable features, individual variations have largely been neglected. This article explores the possibilities for the study of divergent aspects of discursive practices by focusing on the notion of voice and considers the implications for L2 writing research and instruction. I begin by examining recent critiques of the notion of voice that emphasize its strong association with the ideology of individualism and argue that the notion of voice is not exclusively tied to individualism. To demonstrate that the practice of constructing voice is not entirely foreign to so-called “collectivist cultures,” I present evidence of voice in Japanese electronic discourse, focusing on how voice is constructed through the use of language-specific discursive features. Based on this analysis, I argue that the difficulties that Japanese students face in constructing voice in English written discourse are due not to its incompatibility with their cultural orientation but to the different ways in which voice is constructed in Japanese and English as well as the lack of familiarity with the strategies available in English.
Article
To what extent have postmodernism and research modalities which fundamentally question the notion of the objective researcher impacted on the production of Ph.D. theses in the humanities and social sciences? This paper examines the visual and verbal representations of the writerly self through the title pages, tables of contents and introductory chapters of a corpus of 20 recent Ph.D. theses in History and Sociology from an Australian university. While affirming the dominance of the topic-based thesis macrostructure in the social sciences and humanities, it subjects the topic-based thesis category to greater scrutiny, presenting a case for the emergence of a New Humanities Ph.D., marked by its construction of a reflexive self, unable to write with the classic detachment of positivism. The paper briefly considers the implications for disciplinarity and postgraduate pedagogy.
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This paper is a corpus-based study of how native speaker computing students and experts use the pronoun I when elaborating their methodology (‘methodological I’). Using two corpora, (i) a student corpus of about 62,000 words of postgraduate computing project reports, written at the end of the MSc programme and roughly equivalent to the master’s dissertation; and (ii) an expert corpus of about 88,000 words of computing articles taken from prestigious journals, a quantitative analysis of the students’ and experts’ texts reveals that almost 80% of the personal pronouns found in the student corpus are of I, while the figure in the expert corpus is less than 3%. Over 400 occurrences of I in the student corpus, but only six occurrences of I in the expert corpus, were classified as methodological. A qualitative analysis of the data in the student corpus reveals how methodological I can help to achieve a range of textual effects. Methodological I is used to recount procedure step by step, to the extent that even unsuccessful stages of the research process are included. These failures are attributed to lack of knowledge, skills, or equipment. Working in concert with language which stresses the tight deadlines the students are obliged to meet, methodological I can promote the researcher by highlighting their resourcefulness in managing to get their project completed on schedule. Methodological I also helps the student writers to justify their procedure, showing it to be sound and rigorous, thus indirectly promoting the researcher by associating them with methodological diligence. However, even when the students feel obliged to record their procedural failures, methodological I can help them create a favourable impression on the reader by constructing them as tenacious neophytes whose repertoire of computing skills has increased considerably as a result of working on their research project. The study ends with the pedagogical implications of the findings for EAP teachers and students.
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Voice is often represented either expressively as personal and individualistic or socially as a discourse system. Drawing on sociohistoric theory (particularly Voloshinov and Bakhtin), in this article, I argue for a third view in which voice is simultaneously personal and social because discourse is understood as fundamentally historical, situated, and indexical. Specifically, I explore three key ways that voice may be understood from this perspective: voice as a typification linked to social identities; voice as the reenvoicing of others' words in texts (oral and written) through processes of repetition and presupposition; and finally, voice as it is linked to the situated production of persons and social formations. All three are central to discourse acquisition and use in general and to literate activity in particular. Finally, I conclude by considering the implications of this theoretical perspective for second language writing pedagogies.
Article
Academic writing is not just about conveying an ideational ‘content’, it is also about the representation of self. Recent research has suggested that academic prose is not completely impersonal, but that writers gain credibility by projecting an identity invested with individual authority, displaying confidence in their evaluations and commitment to their ideas. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of such an authorial identity is the use of first person pronouns and their corresponding determiners. But while the use of these forms are a powerful rhetorical strategy for emphasising a contribution, many second language writers feel uncomfortable using them because of their connotations of authority. In this paper I explore the notion of identity in L2 writing by examining the use of personal pronouns in 64 Hong Kong undergraduate theses, comparisons with a large corpus of research articles, and interviews with students and their supervisors. The study shows significant underuse of authorial reference by students and clear preferences for avoiding these forms in contexts which involved making arguments or claims. I conclude that the individualistic identity implied in the use of I may be problematic for many L2 writers.
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This paper contends that the L2 literature yields little empirical evidence of a relationship between the features associated with L1 voice and the quality of L2 academic writing. In fact, some of these features may be of little consequence in certain L2 writing contexts. Writing samples requiring learners to argue in favor of or against an aspect of Canada’s immigration policy were elicited from 63 students in a writing-intensive first-year course. These samples were scored by (1) three raters for “voice,” using a special Voice Intensity Rating Scale with four components (assertiveness; self-identification; reiteration of central point; and authorial presence and autonomy of thought), created especially for this study, as well as (2) three raters for overall writing quality, using Jacobs et al.’s (1981) ESL Composition Profile. Interrater reliability, based on the Spearman–Brown Prophesy Formula, was found to be 0.84 for the ratings of voice intensity and 0.73 for the ratings of overall quality. Most importantly, no significant correlation was found either between overall quality and overall voice intensity or between overall quality and any of the four components of voice. The results suggest that there may not be a connection between the linguistic and rhetorical devices commonly associated with individualized voice (e.g., first person singular or intensifiers) and the quality of writing, at least within some genres and at some levels of writing proficiency.
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This review of literature outlines the ways that identity has been theorized in recent years in two educational sub-disciplines concerned with language and education: second language acquisition (SLA) and literacy studies. The article explores how selective appropriations from the work of Bourdieu and Foucault have informed ethnographic and case studies as well as theoretical discussions on identity and learning in these fields. It concludes by arguing that Bakhtin's theories of language have the potential to resolve some of the contradictions between continuity and change that have arisen in these discussions.
Article
Compositionists often speak of the need to help students acquire a voice or identity in their writing. This interest in teaching voice is understandable but also problematic. Satisfactorily defining “voice,” especially from a second language (L2) point of view, is one of those problems. Another is a reliance on various conceptualizations that privilege a “Western” or a romantic or individualistic notion of voice in classroom situations where many students do not share such a background. In this paper, we use three case studies to address a third problem: a tendency in L2 writing instruction and research to overlook the voices, or identities, already possessed by L2 writers, many of whom at the graduate level bring a history of success as professional/academic writers in their native language and culture to the L2 writing classroom. We examine the role voice can play not as a teaching device but rather as a means by which to investigate and understand the voice-related issues these mature writers encounter in L2 contexts.
Article
The notion of prosody in linguistics was originally applied to phonology by Firth (Palmer, 1970) to refer to non-segmental features. Its use has been extended in Systemic Functional Linguistic theory to the levels of grammar and discourse semantics. Here it refers to the way that interpersonal meaning spreads or diffuses across clauses and across longer phases of discourse (Halliday, 1994; [16] and [17]). In this paper I explore how the notion of prosodies of interpersonal meaning can inform our understanding of the construction of evaluative stance in the introductions to academic research papers. I draw initially on Appraisal theory (Martin, 2000) and Martin & Rose (2003) to analyse expressions of ATTITUDE1 and GRADUATION. I then consider how such expressions are used in constructing different kinds of argument, with a particular focus on the prosodies of value that are established. An appreciation of the prosodic patterning of interpersonal meanings and an understanding of how they function in academic discourse, have important implications in the modelling of evaluative stance in texts in the teaching of English for Academic Purposes. There are also broader implications for discourse analytic research in terms of methods of coding values and of justifying coding decisions.
Stance and voice in written academic genres
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