Article published In:
Postgraduate Writing in a Globalised WorldEdited by Emmaline Lear and Elke Stracke
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 39:2] 2016
► pp. 139–157
Edited by Emmaline Lear and Elke Stracke
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 39:2] 2016
► pp. 139–157
Becoming an applied linguist
A study of authorial voice in international PhD students’ confirmation reports
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.
References (30)
Bloomberg, L. D., & Volpe, M. (2012). Completing your qualitative dissertation: A road map from beginning to end (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, California & London: Sage.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Bruce, I. (2014). Expressing criticality in the literature review in research article introductions in applied linguistics and psychology. English for Specific Purposes, 361, 85–96. 
Cadman, C. (1997). Thesis writing for international students: A question of identity? English for Specific Purposes, 16(1), 3–14.
Canagarajah, S. (2015). ‘Blessed in my own way’: Pedagogical affordances for dialogical voice construction in multilingual student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 271, 122–139.
Charles, M. (2007). Argument or evidence? Disciplinary variation in the use of the Noun that pattern in stance construction. English for Specific Purposes, 261, 203–218.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2011). Handbook of qualitative research (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Flowerdew, J., & Wang, S. H. (2015). Identity in academic discourse. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 351, 81–99.
Hood, S. (2006). The persuasive power of prosodies: Radiating values in academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 51, 37–49.
. (2010). Appraising research: Evaluation in academic writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 71, 173–192.
. (2010). Metadiscourse: Mapping interactions in academic writing. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 91, 125–143.
Ivanič, R., & Camps, D. (2001). ‘I am how I sound’: Voice as self-representation in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 101, 3–33.
Kamler, B., & Thompson, P. (2006). Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. New York: Routledge.
Martin, J. R. (2000). Beyond exchange: Appraisal systems in English. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 142–175). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2003). Working with discourse: Meaning beyond the clause. London: Continuum.
Matsuda, K. P. (2015). Identity in written discourse. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 351, 140–159.
Matsuda, P., & Tardy, C. (2007). Voice in academic writing: The rhetorical construction of author identity in blind manuscript review. English for Specific Purposes, 261, 235–249.
Merriam, S. B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study application in education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Mewburn, I., Tokareva, E., Cuthbert, D., Sinclair, J., & Barnacle, R. (2014). ‘These are issues that should not be raised in black and white’: The culture of progress reporting and the doctorate. Higher Education Research and Development, 33(3), 510–522.
Morton, J., Storch, N., & Thompson, C. (2014). Feedback on writing in the supervision of postgraduate students: Insights from Vygotsky and Bakhtin. Journal of Academic Language & Learning, 8(1), 24–36.
Pennycook, A. (1994). The politics of pronouns. ELT Journal, 48(2), 173–178.
Prior, P. (2001). Voices in text, mind, and society. Sociohistoric accounts of discourse acquisition and use. Journal of Second Language Writing, 101, 55–81.
Ramanathan, V., & Atkinson, D. (1999). Individualism, academic writing, and ESL writers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 8(1), 45–75.
Seloni, L. (2014). “I’m an artist and scholar who is trying to find the middle point”: A textographic analysis of a Columbian art historian’s thesis writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 251, 79–99.
Silverman, D. (Ed.). (2011). Qualitative research: Issues of theory, method, and practice (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, C. (2011). Plagiarism, intertextuality and the politics of knowledge, identity and textual ownership in undergraduate ESL/EFL students’ academic writing. In Le Ha Phan & B. Baurain (Eds.), Voices, identities, negotiations, and conflicts: Writing academic English across cultures (pp. 157–177). Bingley, United Kingdom: Emerald.
Thompson, P. (2012). Achieving a voice of authority in PhD theses. In K. Hyland & C. S. Guinda (Eds.), Stance and voice in written academic genres (pp. 117–133). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Anderson, Roger W.
2024. My most intense years: An autoethnographic analysis of language teacher identities and emotions of one dissertating (adjunct) language instructor. TESOL Journal 15:4 
Mosfer Alqahtani, Ghaida
2024. Saudi Graduate Students’ Identities in Relation to Emotion and Agency in Applied Linguistics: A Narrative Multiple Case Study. Arab World English Journal ► pp. 1 ff.
Oliver, Rhonda, Honglin Chen & Sender Dovchin
2024. Review of selected research in applied linguistics published in Australia (2015–2022). Language Teaching 57:3 ► pp. 341 ff.
Pearson, William S. & Esmaeel Abdollahzadeh
2023. Metadiscourse in academic writing: A systematic review. Lingua 293 ► pp. 103561 ff.
Castelló, Montserrat, Lynn McAlpine, Anna Sala-Bubaré, Kelsey Inouye & Isabelle Skakni
2021. What perspectives underlie ‘researcher identity’? A review of two decades of empirical studies. Higher Education 81:3 ► pp. 567 ff.
Morton, Janne & Neomy Storch
2021. Authorial Voice in Doctoral Writing: Published Advice. In Academic Literacy Development, ► pp. 165 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.