ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AND ITS RELATION TO IDENTITY

In the field of academic research and higher education, textual production is at the core of negotiating the interactive relationships among the members of academic communities and claiming and constructing academic identities. From writing essays for exams to submitting dissertations for degree requirements, students have to demonstrate their competence to their degree examiners, who function as gatekeepers, in order to move on to the next stage of their academic careers. Similarly, from submitting manuscripts to journals to writing grant proposals, junior researchers have to satisfy the expectations of their more senior colleagues in order to climb up the ladder of their respective academic communities. Such activities involve, among other things, a process of identity transformation and academic acculturation.

While much research attention has been paid to issues of identity in written academic genres, especially the research article, which is generally considered to be the premier academic genre (e.g., Englander, Reference Englander2009; Hyland, Reference Hyland2012a; Olinger, Reference Olinger2011), more recent studies have also been concerned with spoken genres, namely, classroom teaching (e.g., Biber, Reference Biber2006), student presentations (Zareva, Reference Zareva2013), and Internet-enabled genres such as scholars’ institutional and personal home pages (Hyland, Reference Hyland2011b, Reference Hyland2012b), blogs (Kirkup, Reference Kirkup2010), email discussion lists (Matsuda, Reference Matsuda2002), and massive open online courses (MOOCs) (De Montes, Oran, & Willis, Reference De Montes, Oran and Willis2002).

In terms of pedagogy, the teaching of academic writing has entered a postprocess era, as the focus has shifted from an emphasis on the cognitive processes of textual production to an emphasis on the social dimensions of writing as cultural activity (Atkinson, Reference Atkinson2003) and of writing as the product of communities of practice (Wenger, Reference Wenger1998), or discourse communities (Swales, Reference Swales1990). In the postprocess era, teaching and learning are no longer conceptualized as simply a cognitive process, but also as situated social practice during which novice members of communities develop new identities through “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave & Wenger, Reference Lave and Wenger1991, p. 14).

While most pedagogically oriented efforts in the cultivation of academic identity are concerned with traditional genres such as academic essays, journal articles, or dissertations, the development of other genres in the context of professional education may prove more challenging to teachers. For example, law students may find it difficult to learn to write like a lawyer, to meet the expectations of their clients, while at the same time satisfying the requirements of their professors as students (Maclean, Reference Maclean2010). Business students need to learn how to produce texts that conform to the standards of both business professionals and business students (Zhang, Reference Zhang2013). Similarly, medical students need to at the same time construct their identities as both doctors and medical students (Monrouxe, Reference Monrouxe2010).

If, as referred to above, social identities are constructed through discourse practices within communities of practice, we consider identities as social positions that individuals assume as they interact with others within communities by following certain rules and conventions, while at the same time exercising their agency through their individual linguistic choices (Hyland, Reference Hyland2012a). For example, one can assume the role of a schoolteacher by following the relevant rules and conventions for teachers prescribed by educational institutions; however, an individual teacher also brings his or her personal style and personality to the job to become a unique teacher. Both dimensions are part of the teacher's identity (e.g., Lee, Reference Lee2013; Trent, Reference Trent2010). Reflecting this agency–structure dichotomy referred to earlier, an important theme in identity research in the professional academic context, as highlighted by Flowerdew (Reference Flowerdew2011) and Hyland (Reference Hyland2012a), is the tension between the disciplinary community's expectations for individual members to display proximity to or conform to certain rules and conventions, on the one hand, and individual scholars’ desire to claim their agency and develop their uniqueness, on the other. As Fairclough (Reference Fairclough1993) points out, modern society has become posttraditional in the sense that individuals now have more opportunities to negotiate their relationships with others, including in the academic field, rather than rigidly following the rules and conventions prescribed by particular social roles or identities (see also Giddens, Reference Giddens1991). Due to the negotiable nature of relationships and identities, discursive practice and dialogue become essential for identity construction, which is also a performative process (Butler, Reference Butler1990; Goffman, Reference Goffman1959).

The fluidity of identity is also a consequence of globalization, a phenomenon that has profoundly changed the landscape of academic communication. For the first time in human history, English has become a global language for scientific communication (e.g., Mauranen, Reference Mauranen2012), and users of English as an additional language (EAL) now outnumber those who speak English as their first language (e.g., Haberland, Reference Haberland2011). EAL novice scholars have to face two problems at the same time—lack of experience in academic writing and limited proficiency in English—a situation that originates from their dual identities as new members of the academic community and as EAL writers. The traditional distinction between native and nonnative users of English, however, has begun to be broken down, with scholars working on English as a lingua franca (ELF) arguing that the linguistic practices of second language (L2) users should be accepted as equally appropriate as those of their first language (L1) peers, so long as the texts are intelligible (Jenkins, Reference Jenkins2013; Mauranen, Reference Mauranen2012). ELF perspectives suggest that socialization is, in fact, a two-way street. New members have to develop new identities to be socialized into the community. Meanwhile, the community may also need to change as a result of the participation of new members (Crystal, Reference Crystal2003; Jenkins, Reference Jenkins2013).

LINGUISTIC RESOURCES FOR AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT

Given the fluidity and multiplicity of identities, it is very difficult to study the concept directly in applied linguistics. Following the tradition of sociolinguistics, research attention has focused on specific linguistic features in discourse practices (Hymes, Reference Hymes1977) and how such practices are linked to different aspects of identities, a process referred to as indexicality (Bucholtz & Hall, Reference Bucholtz and Hall2004). For example, voice—defined by Narayan (Reference Narayan2012) as “the sense of communicating an individual presence behind written [or spoken] words” (p. 85)—as an important aspect of identity, may be indexed through the use of linguistic resources such as hedges, boosters, and attitude markers (Biber, Reference Biber2006; Hyland, Reference Hyland2005); rhetorical moves in generic structure (Swales, Reference Swales1990); and citation practices (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, Reference Mansourizadeh and Ahmad2011; see also Castelló, Iñesta, Pardo, Liesa, & Martínez-Fernández, Reference Castelló, Iñesta, Pardo, Liesa and Martínez-Fernández2012).

If identity is not a fixed entity, but discursively and dynamically constructed through interaction between writers, speakers, and audiences, it follows that the ways audiences engage through the use of different linguistic resources may shed light on the process of identity construction. This issue has been investigated by a number of studies, many of which are corpus-based. One such corpus-based study of abstracts and research articles from the 1970s to the present following a model developed by Hyland (Reference Hyland2005) is that of Gillaerts and Van de Velde (Reference Gillaerts and Van de Velde2010), which investigated the use of interactional discourse markers (hedges, boosters, and attitude markers) in these genres. As revealed by their use of these markers, Gillaerts and Van de Velde found that authors enact distinct identities in their abstracts as compared to the main body of their articles by using more boosters (e.g., demonstrate, undoubtedly, it is clear that) and fewer hedges (e.g., might, suggest, probably) to promote their research to their readers. They furthermore found that the frequency of use of these markers of interpersonality (i.e., hedges, boosters) had diminished over the 30-year span of the corpus. Also, using the abstracts of applied linguistics research articles as corpus data, Hu and Cao (Reference Hu and Cao2011) distinguished (multilingual) authors by their choice of language (Chinese or English) and their methodological approach (empirical and nonempirical). They found that authors writing in English use more hedges than their counterparts writing in Chinese, and researchers discussing empirical studies use more boosters to convey their respective linguistic and disciplinary identities.

Another corpus-based study, this time by Hewings, Lillis, and Vladimirou (Reference Hewings, Lillis and Vladimirou2010), focused on citation practices as a discursive tool for constructing interpersonal aspects of identities and establishing authors as members of their disciplinary communities (psychology in this case). Focusing on articles written by researchers from non-Anglophone contexts, the researchers found that citations acted as an indicator of the identity of the author within their (international) disciplinary community, and that these writers, in citing texts primarily published in English, emphasized their international identity at the expense of their local identity. An important implication of such identity building is that locally based research may not receive as much exposure as it might merit, thus imposing a restriction on the flow of knowledge. In a study on citation practices found in a small specialized corpus of research papers, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (Reference Mansourizadeh and Ahmad2011) compared the citation types and functions of novice and expert authors, finding that expert writers are more likely to use integral citations (inside the structure of the sentence) rather than nonintegral citations (outside the structure of the sentence) (Swales, Reference Swales1986) to support their claims, establish links with previous studies, and thereby construct their identity as members of the discourse community.

Closely related to displaying proximity is building consensus with the reader, which may, according to Warchał (Reference Warchał2010), be accomplished through the use of conditional clauses. Warchał found that, while 57% of conditional clauses in a corpus of linguistics papers serve as content conditionals dominated by ideational meanings, different types of conditional clauses including epistemic, politeness, relevance, metalinguistic, reservation, concessive, and rhetorical conditional clauses are used to negotiate the interpersonal meanings (and hence the respective identities) between writers and readers. In an article using three case studies of undergraduate essays (not corpus-based, this time), Baratta (Reference Baratta2009) argued that students may use the passive voice not necessarily as a means for hiding agency but to reveal author stance on subject matter.

VOICE AND ACADEMIC IDENTITY

Voice, as defined earlier, is the way individuals represent or identify themselves in their discourse (Narayan, Reference Narayan2012, p. 85). In the context of the academy, as Prior (Reference Prior2001) pointed out, voice is at the same time personal and social, in that individual writers express their individual stance towards their subject matter while at the same time appropriating the voices of others through intertextual practices (Bakhtin, Holquist, & Emerson, Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1986). At the social level, voice is a means for individuals to articulate social identities prescribed through social labels such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers. At the personal level, however, individuals may assume different roles as principals, authors, and animators (Goffman, Reference Goffman1981) when producing texts according to specific circumstances and contexts. In line with Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, Reference Halliday and Matthiessen2004), Ivanič and Camps (Reference Ivanič and Camps2001) argued that voice as self-representation of writers may be constructed through different types of positioning, including ideational positioning in terms of representing the world, interpersonal positioning in terms of writer-reader relationship, and textual positioning in terms of creating coherent and meaningful texts.

In a pedagogically oriented study, Castelló et al. (Reference Castelló, Iñesta, Pardo, Liesa and Martínez-Fernández2012) argued that opportunities to receive feedback on writing, knowledge about construction of academic voice, and awareness of different linguistic resources can help student writers improve the quality of their texts and hence better construct their identity as writers through revision. Liang's (Reference Liang2013) work on Taiwanese students learning journalistic English who were writing in the online community Second Life (a language course in which participants write and revise their work online) further confirms the interpersonal nature of voice construction and points to the importance of revision and intervention for the identity construction of L2 writers. In a further study on voice, Dressen-Hammouda (Reference Dressen-Hammouda2014) focused on the development of disciplinary voice over time, as novice scholars make progress in their academic career. Dressen-Hammouda tracked a number of linguistic features as indexing voice among geology scholars over 10 years post-PhD by means of situated genre analysis and using an index of linguistic features.

Using a corpus-based approach, Lorés-Sanz (Reference Lorés-Sanz2011) focused on the use of first-person pronouns by L1 English writers, L1 Spanish writers, and L2 English writers with Spanish as their L1 and studied how they construct their voices and make themselves visible in their texts through interpersonal positioning. Lorés-Sanz found that the variation of frequency and discourse functions of first-person pronouns is subject to the influence of writers’ linguistic and disciplinary backgrounds (a point to be further discussed below in the sections on disciplinary identities and ELF).

Matsuda (Reference Matsuda2001) defined voice from the perspective of the reader, not the writer, as “the reader's impression derived from the particular combination of the ways in which both discursive and non-discursive features are used” (p. 239). Based on this definition, Matsuda and Tardy (Reference Matsuda and Tardy2007) investigated how readers construct the voice of writers in a simulated blind peer review process and found that manuscript reviewers apply their own assumptions, beliefs, values, and expectations when interpreting the voice of the writers they are reviewing. Matsuda and Tardy argued that “shifting the discussion of voice from the sole province of the writer to the jointly constructed reader-writer interaction can provide rich insight into the readers’ role in the process of constructing voice” and that “broadening the scope of voice to an overall impression of the author can bring us closer to the rhetorical processes that readers enact when reading and evaluating academic texts” (p. 247).

DISCIPLINARY IDENTITY

Given the importance of disciplines in the academy, identities are often constructed according to the conventions of specific communities of disciplinary practices. Novice members need to follow certain rules and satisfy gatekeepers in order to become socialized into their disciplinary communities. This process of socialization may begin in secondary schools (or even earlier), when students are engaged in content area writing tasks (e.g., Kibler, Reference Kibler2011). But L2 students may have concerns in their writing that are different from those of their teachers. As Kibler (Reference Kibler2011) found, in an ethnographic study of L2 high school students in the United States, that while science teachers were interested in developing students’ skills to write like a scientist, students were more preoccupied with writing clearly. This divergence in perceptions of writing requirements may be partly due to the multiple identities involved: teachers as mentors concerned with introducing students to the disciplinary discourse of science and the L2 students as disadvantaged writers struggling over producing intelligible English texts.

Dressen-Hammouda (Reference Dressen-Hammouda2014) studied the longitudinal development of the disciplinary voices of experienced geology scholars after their PhD dissertations by tracking (over a decade) the specific generic moves found in their writing. She found that credible disciplinary voice developed in similar ways among the participants in her study, as they consistently used more personalization indexes (e.g., author pronouns, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, and interpretive comments) and disciplinary indexes (e.g., nominal or adjectival field descriptors, technical verbal adjectives and participles, and references to others’ fieldwork) after years of disciplinary experience to engage their audience in discipline-specific manners. In a qualitative text analysis, Maclean (Reference Maclean2010) focused on the development of the professional identities of law students. By comparing student texts with professional texts, Maclean found that the students conveyed conflicting identities of law student, on the one hand, and legal professional, on the other, as compared to the experts, who conveyed a single consistent professional identity.

In a book-length treatment focusing on professional disciplinary identity and based on corpus studies of various academic genres, including acknowledgment texts, academic home pages, and biographies, Hyland (Reference Hyland2012a) explored how author identity and disciplinary identity interact in academic discourse. This same issue was also explored in a collection of papers edited by Gotti (Reference Gotti2009), Commonality and Individuality in Academic Discourse.

IDENTITY IN PERIPHERAL ACADEMIC GENRES

While research articles and academic essays have been the major data sources for studies of disciplinary identity, other genres have also provided opportunities for research into identity in academic discourse. In particular, with the development of digital technologies, new genres have developed.

Internet home pages are a conspicuous site where individuals may discursively construct their identities. Echoing the overall themes of individuality versus conformity and agency versus structure of identity research, Hyland (Reference Hyland2011a) explored how scholars express their individual selves using the different semiotic resources available in the form of academic home pages under the institutional control of the university. Further highlighting these themes, Hyland (Reference Hyland2012b) compared the academic and personal home pages of university scholars (i.e. those web pages under the control of the institutions and those free of such control) to see how they make linguistic choices under different circumstances. In academic home pages sponsored by institutions, these scholars tend to focus more on their identification with their universities following the conventions and expectations of the visitors of the university websites as constrained by the required formatting of the university pages. However, the same scholars utilize a range of multimodal semiotic resources such as pictures and hyperlinks to create a more personal online brand in their personal home pages.

Blogging by academic scholars, unlike conventional journal publication, offers an alternative channel to develop raw ideas and display the emotional side of scholars’ selves (Kirkup, Reference Kirkup2010). Free of the constraint of rigorous peer review, academic blogging offers an informal platform for scholars to discuss their research and engage with their audiences in the exchange of ideas and information. In a sense, academic blogging is a way for individual scholars to get away from the rigid expectations of the research community and construct a more personal identity (Mauranen, Reference Mauranen2013). More subversive is the potential for blogging by students and the creation of hidden transcripts (Scott, Reference Scott1990) of resistance against the institutionally embedded power and authority of teachers. As Liew (Reference Liew2010) discovered in an ethnographic case study of a student's blog entry, blogging may create a space for students to reveal aspects of themselves that are not publicly available through formal academic discourse or other more overt discursive practices. The irony that lies in blogs, as in other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, is that, despite the public nature of these online discourses, access to them by parents and teachers may be considered by students as an invasion of their privacy (Maranto & Barton, Reference Maranto and Barton2010). Young people want to keep these online identities hidden from their guardians and reserved for their peers.

Identity construction activity may also be found in some obscure places in academic settings. Attenborough (Reference Attenborough2011) analyzed library textbook marginalia (comments written by students on the textbook margins that are publicly observable), showing how students negotiate two different identities: doing education (as a diligent student) and doing being a student (with less commitment to education). In an equally creative approach, Olinger (Reference Olinger2011) investigated student writers’ stances towards a single word, discourse. Based on videotaped collaborative writing sessions and interviews, he found that stances on discourse such as knowledge display and positive evaluation are used to index different discoursal or social identities (e.g., student ethnographer).

ACADEMIC IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT OVER TIME

As Burgess and Ivanic (Reference Burgess and Ivanic2010) point out, in order to fully understand the construction of writer identity, it is important to explore the relationship between discourse and time. Writer identity construction may be studied as a process situated in multiple temporal dimensions. Burgess (Reference Burgess2012) elaborated a framework consisting of various temporal levels: sociocultural (decades, centuries); ontogenetic (months, years); mesolevel (weeks, months); and microgenetic (seconds, minutes, hours). Burgess applied this framework to investigate identity development in student writing in an adult literacy class in the United Kingdom. Also concerned with the development of writer identity over time, Ryshina-Pankova (Reference Ryshina-Pankova2011) investigated how American students learning to write book reviews in German use different thematization patterns in their sentences over time periods. She found that more advanced writers move away from the direct expression of opinion, as manifested in thematization strategies (e.g., the use of first-person pronouns), and move towards more intersubjective and hence persuasive strategies over time (e.g., thematization of the reader of the book review). As previously noted, in a longitudinal study over a decade, Dressen-Hammouda (Reference Dressen-Hammouda2014) investigated the development of voice among scholars in a specific disciplinary field (geology), finding that novice scholars learn to adopt more appropriate disciplinary voices over time as they became more senior members of the academic community.

ACADEMIC IDENTITY AND ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA (ELF)

ELF has been defined as “any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option” (Seidlhofer, Reference Seidlhofer2011, p. 7). Since, due to globalization, English became the dominant language in international scholarly communication, users of EAL have become important members of the international academic community of scholars, their numbers now likely outnumbering Anglophones (e.g., Mauranen, Reference Mauranen2010). Research attention has been focused on how novice EAL scholars handle difficulties in writing and publishing research articles in English journals (e.g., Cargill & O’Connor, Reference Cargill and O’Connor2006; Cho, Reference Cho2004; Flowerdew & Y. Li, Reference Flowerdew, Li and Manchón2009; Lillis & Curry, Reference Lillis and Curry2006; Mur-Dueñas, Reference Mur-Dueñas2013). Particularly relevant to our theme is the debate between Flowerdew and Casanave on the stigmatization of EAL scholars attempting to publish their work in English (Casanave, Reference Casanave2008; Flowerdew, Reference Flowerdew2008), with Flowerdew arguing that (following Goffman's conception of stigma) EAL writers might be considered to be treated as a stigmatized group and Casanave disagreeing with this, on the grounds that such an approach may itself have a stigmatizing effect on such writers. The main cause of potential stigmatization of EAL writers is obviously their potential linguistic deficiency in the eyes of academic gatekeepers, who are often (although increasingly less often) native speakers of English. ELF scholars take the view that a distinction should be made between language learners and language users. ELF users, it is argued, should not be alienated (stigmatized) by being labeled as “deficient communicators who struggle with difficulties” (Mauranen, Reference Mauranen2012, p. 5), that is, learners. Instead, it should be acknowledged that languages change over time and that, through the contact of ELF users from diverse linguistic backgrounds with weak social ties to the center Anglophone countries (Kachru, Reference Kachru, Quirk and Widdowson1985), ELF has developed into a commons for all EAL users of English.

As Seidlhofer (Reference Seidlhofer2011, p. xii) points out, work on ELF has mainly focused on spoken language, probably because it is easier to study processes of variation and change in this register. One notable article on ELF written communication is Rozycki and Johnson's (Reference Rozycki and Johnson2013) study of a small corpus of award-winning engineering research articles written by EAL writers. Rozycki and Johnson found that these papers, despite their undisputed scientific merit, contain a significant amount of what the researchers refer to as noncanonical grammar, such as the dropping of articles and absence of concord in number marking between subject and predicate. The findings thus suggest that the identity of ELF scholars who use noncanonical forms may be becoming a bona fide identity, which is no longer stigmatized.

POWER, IDEOLOGY, AND CRITICAL LANGUAGE AWARENESS IN ACADEMIC IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

Power is an important discursively constructed dimension of identity. In academic settings, as we reviewed in the section on ELF, L2 academic writers may find themselves in less powerful positions, as they have to conform to the expectations of gatekeepers who are often native speakers (or to nonnative speakers, who nevertheless apply native-speaker norms). Yet, this unequal power relation may be mitigated if there is a change of perspective on the ownership of language and L2 scholars’ writing comes to be assessed according to communicative effectiveness, or intelligibility, rather than native-speaker standards, as seems to be happening with ELF.

In the context of language teaching, the power relation between teachers and students and among students has been investigated from an identity perspective. Mayes (Reference Mayes2010) investigated the construction of teacher identity in the context of the power relations dynamic in an English composition program at a U.S. university. In an analysis of the institutional context and of the discursive construction of teachers’ identities, Mayes found there to be contradictions between the goal of reduction of power difference between teacher and student and some of the teaching practices that were investigated. As a result, power was not effectively distributed as intended. Mayes concluded that critical pedagogy theorists have underestimated the importance of considering the role of micro-level interaction in the construction of power relations.

Also in an English composition teaching context, Liu (Reference Liu2011) focused on how a group of nonnative speakers of English students in Taiwan perceived and negotiated power with their counterparts and email partners in an American undergraduate institute. Liu found that the Taiwanese students felt inferior (less powerful) in relation to their American counterparts due to their limited linguistic skills or to Taiwan's “inferior” cultural status. Some American students also felt less powerful based on their relative disadvantage in computer literacy and global knowledge. Students adopted different discursive strategies to deal with the power differentials they perceived themselves to be subject to in communicating with their international counterparts. While students under the interactional style of balance used a friendly, informal, and conversational communication style to create a “friend” or “classmate” image, students under the endurance style preferred formal, polite, academic, and fact-oriented language and construed a “tourist guide” or “cultural ambassador” identity (Liu, Reference Liu2011, p. 267).

In the context of teacher education, Vasconcelos (Reference Vasconcelos2013) studied how the adoption of a model of dialogic education that places the teacher and students in a more balanced power relation than traditionally found led to a “moment of crisis” in a dialogic speech event in which students negotiated the common sense meanings of the identity marker “Americans” in the context of ethnic diversity and inclusion. A detailed analysis of this linguistic event using the framework developed by Fairclough (Reference Fairclough1992b) and the rules of dialogue from Burbules (Reference Burbules1993) demonstrates how teacher trainees may be engaged in critical questions and moments of crisis related to race and identity.

In an action research study based on a business English course in Singapore, Weninger and Kan (Reference Weninger and Kan2013) incorporated critical language awareness (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough1992a) into the curriculum and made efforts to sensitize students to different metalinguistic resources available for constructing interpersonal relations and identity with their audiences. The researchers argued that a critical approach to language learning is essential because students tend to view language as an instrument of practical utility rather than of identity construction.

LANGUAGE RE-USE, INTERTEXTUALITY, AND ACADEMIC IDENTITY

An important issue in academic identity construction is that of intertextuality, how students and professional academics may appropriate textual features from other texts (e.g., Pecorari & Shaw, Reference Pecorari and Shaw2012). When students or scholars copy directly from sources, they may be accused of plagiarism. Others have argued that a certain amount of such “patchwriting” (Howard, Reference Howard1993) or language re-use (Flowerdew & Li, Reference Flowerdew and Li2007) is a natural feature of academic identity development. A special issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing recently focused on this issue (Polio & Shi, Reference Polio and Shi2012). In one of the articles in that collection, a case study of two undergraduates in a Hong Kong university working on their writing tasks, Li and Casanave (Reference Li and Casanave2012) argued that the identity label “plagiarists” may not be appropriate for students engaged in borrowing chunks of texts from other sources. Less stigmatizing labels such as patchwriting and textual borrowing may be applied to the relevant language re-use practices.

Acknowledging the complex and controversial nature of the topic, again in the special issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing, Shi (Reference Shi2012) interviewed a number of students and professors about their views of four specific writing samples by L2 writers involving paraphrasing, summarizing, and translation. The comments made by participants suggested that issues related to language re-use were not as straightforward as they seemed and the standards also varied a great deal across disciplines. In a third study in the special issue, this time focusing on faculty members, Pecorari and Shaw (Reference Pecorari and Shaw2012) obtained a finding consistent with Li and Casanave (Reference Li and Casanave2012) and Shi (Reference Shi2012), this time that faculty members may find it difficult to reach consensus when judging the appropriateness of different intertextuality practices.

Language re-use may thus be considered not so much as a matter of avoiding plagiarism, but more of an issue of making identity claims using different linguistic resources available in others’ voices and discourses. The study of language practices of English-speaking university students in Bangladesh by Sultana (Reference Sultana2014) illustrates this point aptly, as the research participants used linguistic resources from Western media such as mockery, parody, and other exotic ideas to highlight their class-based identity and distance themselves from the innate identity of Bangladesh women.

Given the intertextual nature of writing, Bunch and Willett (Reference Bunch and Willett2013) investigated how a group of U.S. middle school English as a second language (ESL) students engaged in voice and discourse appropriation when working on a writing assignment in social studies. Using a framework developed by Bazerman (Reference Bazerman, Bazerman and Prior2004), they found that the students employed a variety of language re-use strategies in their writing: drawing on curriculum and content; referencing texts; invoking generally circulating beliefs; getting personal; and using stock phrases, idioms, similes, metaphors, and images.

In a case study of two ESL undergraduates in the United States, Hirvela and Du (Reference Hirvela and Du2013) investigated the students’ understanding of the purposes and functions of paraphrasing, an important technique of language re-use and voice appropriation. Based on a framework originally developed by Bereiter and Scardamalia (Reference Bereiter and Scardamalia1987), Hirvela and Du made a distinction between paraphrasing for knowledge telling and paraphrasing for knowledge transforming, and found that students were more confident with the former, but encountered increasing difficulty with the latter. The shift from knowledge telling to knowledge transforming would seem to be a rite of passage essential for novice researchers in their identity development.

Also interested in students’ citation practices, Petrić (Reference Petrić2012) compared the direct quotations used in lower-rated and higher-rated MA theses of English as a foreign language (EFL) research students in an English-speaking university in Central Europe. Petrić found that, despite different motivations behind direct quotations, MA students with higher grades tended to use shorter, modified direct quotation, whereas those with lower grades tended to use clause-based quotations. This finding corresponds with the knowledge telling–knowledge transforming dichotomy used in Bereiter and Scardamalia's (Reference Bereiter and Scardamalia1987) study.

PEDAGOGICALLY ORIENTED STUDIES AND ACADEMIC IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

Since one of the central concerns in identity research in academic discourse is how novice members become increasingly socialized into communities of practice through situated discursive practice, applied linguists and language teachers have explored different options for helping novices in the process of identity transformation, usually in the context of school or university education. We have already reviewed some such pedagogically oriented studies under other headings above, namely, Mayes's (Reference Mayes2010) attempt to introduce critical language awareness to language courses, Weninger & Kan's (Reference Weninger and Kan2013)'s development of a business communication course based on critical pedagogy, and Castelló et al.'s (Reference Castelló, Iñesta, Pardo, Liesa and Martínez-Fernández2012) study on teaching how to construct academic voice.

In response to Matsuda and Tardy's (Reference Matsuda and Tardy2007) emphasis on the importance of voice in L2 writing (reported above), Stapleton and Helms-Park (Reference Stapleton and Helms-Park2008) argued that other linguistic issues such as syntax, lexis, and textual organization should be dealt with before voice and identity with novice L2 writers. In contrast with Stapleton and Helms-Park, in a pedagogically oriented study focusing on the academic voice of a group of psychology students using an experimental group and a control group, Castelló et al. (Reference Castelló, Iñesta, Pardo, Liesa and Martínez-Fernández2012) found that explicit teaching of linguistic resources for constructing academic voice through tutorials and collaborative writing, both online and face-to-face, helped student writers in the experimental group find their own voice and improve the quality of texts they produced relative to their counterparts in the control group.

In a teacher education study focusing on the identity development of writing teachers in Hong Kong, Lee (Reference Lee2013) investigated how a number of writing teachers shifted their identities from language teachers to writing teachers, appropriating discourses from the literature on writing pedagogy. The methodology used in this study focused not only on the discursive construction of teacher identity but also on the process of identity development through actual teaching activities, an essential component for understanding the pedagogical issues in academic discourse.

In response to widespread problems of plagiarism among students learning academic writing, Elander, Pittam, Lusher, Fox, and Payne (Reference Elander, Pittam, Lusher, Fox and Payne2010) administered an instructional intervention to a large group of UK university students (N = 364) focusing on the issue of authorial identity. The intervention consisted of a discussion with students of relevant topics such as the definition of the terms “author” and “authorship,” the concept “authorial decision,” and examples of student writing with suspected or alleged plagiarism. Evaluation based on a postintervention Student Authorship Questionnaire and follow-up focus groups suggested that the intervention helped students to gain more confidence in developing their own authorial identities while avoiding plagiarism.

Targeted more specifically at international research students in an Australian university, Li and Vandermensbrugghe (Reference Li and Vandermensbrugghe2011) reported on a writing support group composed of two experienced faculty facilitators and 38 research students engaged in activities such as reading and commenting on members’ writing and text revision strategies. Based on the observation of faculty facilitators, questionnaires, and focus group discussions with student participants, they found that the group writing activities provided helpful support for the novice writers in their academic identity building in terms of stylistic changes, improvement at discourse level, attention to the writing context, and reader awareness development.