Inviting individual voice to second language academic writing

Our purpose in this paper is to present the findings of a study aimed at investigating how second language (L2) student-writers construct their identities as academic authors in tertiary education. We consider the restraints institutionalized text production can place on the emergence of writer voice and writer identity, and call for pedagogical approaches to writing to take on board our findings to better help student-writers in the process of finding their unique academic writer-voice. While the specific socio-cultural and institutional contexts within which people write limit possibilities for authorial self-representation, we argue that writers should be encouraged to bring their own life histories and sense of the self to their texts. Writer identity is reflected in the rhetorical and lexico-grammatical choices writers make and is therefore equated with the notion of writer voice (Zhao 2015, p.33). The study follows the notion of writer voice as proposed by Lehman. She proposes categorising writer voice into three main types: individual, collective and depersonalized. As these three aspects of voice are predominantly cued through metadiscourse features we employed a three-dimensional analytic rubric designed by Lehman in order to identify and analyze the potential of individual voice in the facilitation and enhancement of academic writing in a second language (see Lehman 2018).