The formation of writer identity through writing response groups in the classroom

<p>Supporting the formation of children's identity as writers in the context of interaction within a writing response group was the focus of this study. The children in the study were in a composite Year Seven and Eight class. The children were randomly placed in groups of five or six members. Talk in the groups, students' writing journals, and the teacher/researcher's journal were analysed from a socio-cultural perspective to investigate how the group contributed to the formation of children's literate identity. The analysis revealed that responses served to acknowledge children's writing as interesting and worthy of attention. The acknowledgement created a social energy that contributed to growth in children's writing, enabling children access to the roles they desired in the classroom. The study highlighted the importance of children being able to form an identity as a writer to enable them to successfully engage in literacy activities.</p>

The formation of writer identity through writing response groups in the classroom

<p>Supporting the formation of children's identity as writers in the context of interaction within a writing response group was the focus of this study. The children in the study were in a composite Year Seven and Eight class. The children were randomly placed in groups of five or six members. Talk in the groups, students' writing journals, and the teacher/researcher's journal were analysed from a socio-cultural perspective to investigate how the group contributed to the formation of children's literate identity. The analysis revealed that responses served to acknowledge children's writing as interesting and worthy of attention. The acknowledgement created a social energy that contributed to growth in children's writing, enabling children access to the roles they desired in the classroom. The study highlighted the importance of children being able to form an identity as a writer to enable them to successfully engage in literacy activities.</p>

A Study of University Students in Japan: Learning and Application of Academic English Writing

<p>This study investigated Japanese first and second year undergraduate students learning English academic writing in their compulsory English composition courses in a Japanese university. The thesis takes a social constructivist approach to investigate the aspects of critical argument and writer identity in these students’ classes and their writing. The data for the study include classroom observations and teacher and student interviews, all conducted monthly throughout the academic year-long course. In total there were six courses, four teachers, and sixteen student participants. The observations were analyzed using an adapted version of Ivanič’s (2004) Discourses of Writing framework, which focused on aspects of identity construction in the writing classroom. The linguistic data included a selection of one major piece of writing from each student, analyzed using an adapted Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin, 1997; 2000). In order to maintain a focus on writer identity in the analysis, Clark and Ivanič’s (1997) selves were identified through this analysis. In addition, the texts were analyzed for use of Casanave’s (2002) writing game strategies, in order to further establish the students’ approaches in writing their texts. The objective was not to generalize about how Japanese students learn to write academic English, but rather to provide, from a social constructivist, Western researcher’s perspective, an analysis of what happened in these students’ writing classes and how it affected their writing for those classes. Teachers’ general practices in the observed courses mainly focused on two aspects of writing: 1) as a communicative act (writing for a reader), and 2) as an exercise in critical thinking (developing a thesis). These two aspects emerged from the observation and interview data collection. The four teachers used very different approaches in designing their courses, and the students in the same classes responded in different ways, mostly depending on their ability to understand their teachers’ intentions and to form appropriate academic identities in an attempt to meet their teachers’ expectations. The analysis of the students’ written texts revealed that students often did not meet the teachers’ expectations of writing objectively and using a genre-appropriate voice as students often resorted to the same authorial voice to push their thesis. This investigation was designed to inform pedagogic practices for university teachers of academic English and curriculum designers in Japan to establish effective English writing courses. The rich description of classroom practices and resulting written texts and the focus on differences in cultural expectations between teachers and students provide significant contributions to this area of inquiry. The main pedagogical suggestions are standardizing course objectives and goals, assigning more reading as a part of writing, and teaching students how to write authoritatively.</p>

A Study of University Students in Japan: Learning and Application of Academic English Writing

<p>This study investigated Japanese first and second year undergraduate students learning English academic writing in their compulsory English composition courses in a Japanese university. The thesis takes a social constructivist approach to investigate the aspects of critical argument and writer identity in these students’ classes and their writing. The data for the study include classroom observations and teacher and student interviews, all conducted monthly throughout the academic year-long course. In total there were six courses, four teachers, and sixteen student participants. The observations were analyzed using an adapted version of Ivanič’s (2004) Discourses of Writing framework, which focused on aspects of identity construction in the writing classroom. The linguistic data included a selection of one major piece of writing from each student, analyzed using an adapted Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin, 1997; 2000). In order to maintain a focus on writer identity in the analysis, Clark and Ivanič’s (1997) selves were identified through this analysis. In addition, the texts were analyzed for use of Casanave’s (2002) writing game strategies, in order to further establish the students’ approaches in writing their texts. The objective was not to generalize about how Japanese students learn to write academic English, but rather to provide, from a social constructivist, Western researcher’s perspective, an analysis of what happened in these students’ writing classes and how it affected their writing for those classes. Teachers’ general practices in the observed courses mainly focused on two aspects of writing: 1) as a communicative act (writing for a reader), and 2) as an exercise in critical thinking (developing a thesis). These two aspects emerged from the observation and interview data collection. The four teachers used very different approaches in designing their courses, and the students in the same classes responded in different ways, mostly depending on their ability to understand their teachers’ intentions and to form appropriate academic identities in an attempt to meet their teachers’ expectations. The analysis of the students’ written texts revealed that students often did not meet the teachers’ expectations of writing objectively and using a genre-appropriate voice as students often resorted to the same authorial voice to push their thesis. This investigation was designed to inform pedagogic practices for university teachers of academic English and curriculum designers in Japan to establish effective English writing courses. The rich description of classroom practices and resulting written texts and the focus on differences in cultural expectations between teachers and students provide significant contributions to this area of inquiry. The main pedagogical suggestions are standardizing course objectives and goals, assigning more reading as a part of writing, and teaching students how to write authoritatively.</p>

The structure of academic writer identity in L2 book reviews by Russian undergradu-ates: Voice and stance

Introduction. The article focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of academic writer identity. The theoretical aspect comprises the analysis of the Anglo-American bulk of research devoted to the problem of writer identity in the academic written discourse. The purpose of the article is to define the structure of writer identity, its voice and stance. The practical objectives of the study is to investigate the identity of novice academic writers represented in their language choices as well as to describe the mechanism of such choices. In order to accomplish the purpose of the research, three types of writer positioning are distinguished: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. Materials and Methods. The theoretical analysis is based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach and Rhetorical Genre Studies as well as recent developments of ESP. The analysis of empirical data has been conducted using the methods of discourse analysis as well as qualitative and quantitative methods of data processing. The study reveals the voice and stance represented by lexico-grammatical means of the English academic written discourse. The conducted experiment introduces the context of ESP and models the situation of the implementation of the genre approach in the Academic Writing course in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which is one of the leading technical universities in Russia. The research materials include texts of academic book reviews written in English by Russian undergraduates. Results. The study has revealed the social nature of writer identity determined by the genre hybridity of a book review. It is shown that identification and positioning are in direсt connection with the source text; thus, while choosing a textbook of a general science book, the writer identity is getting to be collective or professional. Depending on the functional style of the source text, the rhetorical markers are changing as well. Thus, while choosing a textbook, students are writing for the teacher and addresses the student audience; at the same time in case of the general science text, the student rises to the level of an expert and addresses the scientific community. The popular science text helps work out the individual voice while the author’s style is changing toward the creative one and the dialogue between the writer and the reader is taking an intimate coloring. Subjectivity markers (adjectives with the negative value, boosters) are getting to be typical for the Russian linguistic and academic culture. Conclusions. The article concludes that constructing the socially-predetermined writer identity is an essential skill for students and academics. The writer identity is fluid and changeable depending on the social context – academic discourse and genre characteristics. The genre of a book review that combines objectivity and subjectivity gives an opportunity to construct writer identity according to the choice of the source text. The writer identity is culturally-predetermined and connected with the standards of Russian linguistic culture, academic rules and traditions of teaching English as a foreign language in Russia.

Writer Identity Construction in EFL Doctoral Thesis Writing

Research on EFL doctoral thesis writing is booming. The literature indicates a link between doctoral thesis writing and identity formation. Despite the call for scholarly attention on doctoral thesis writers, writers of doctoral theses in English as a Foreign language (EFL) settings have not been well represented in the previous studies. Moreover, although writer identity has been proposed as consisting of four aspects, most of the research has mainly adopted a corpus approach to discuss the discoursal self or authorial identity. To bridge these gaps, this study explored how multicultural writers at a university in Thailand constructed identity through EFL doctoral thesis writing and how their multiple aspects of writer identity interplayed. With the data triangulated from a questionnaire, written narratives, and semi-structured interviews, the study revealed that 1) multiple identities are developed through writers’ self-adjustment and social acculturation; 2) passive alignment to institutional conventions leads to an actual distancing from discoursal construction of writer identity; 3) self-marginalization as EFL learners, negative external voices, and the role of student writer most hinder the development and representation of the authorial self. The research recommends EFL learners should be explicitly informed of the notions of constructing an authorial voice in the writing of doctoral theses. Keywords writer identity; identity construction; EFL doctoral thesis writing; novice writer; non-native English-speaking context

The Relationship between Comfort with Writing and Comfort Working with Numbers in STEM

Informed by writer-identity theory explaining links between emotion and identity, this study explores college STEM students’ feelings of comfort pertaining to math literacy, quantitative literacy, writing in STEM, and writing in general. Survey data from STEM majors (N = 134) was analyzed with Spearman rho tests of association. Results indicated that feelings of comfort working with numbers was significantly associated with comfort writing about numbers (rs = .504, p < .001); comfort writing about numbers was significantly associated with comfort writing in STEM (rs = .265, p = .002); and comfort writing in STEM was significantly associated with comfort writing in general (rs = .558, p < .001). This study suggests links between positive emotional experiences, which are implicated in identity performances, of quantitative writing, disciplinary writing, and writing in general. Future research on emotional experience and writer identity across the curriculum and in the disciplines is called for.

Artificial intelligence based writer identification generates new evidence for the unknown scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa)

The Dead Sea Scrolls are tangible evidence of the Bible’s ancient scribal culture. This study takes an innovative approach to palaeography—the study of ancient handwriting—as a new entry point to access this scribal culture. One of the problems of palaeography is to determine writer identity or difference when the writing style is near uniform. This is exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa). To this end, we use pattern recognition and artificial intelligence techniques to innovate the palaeography of the scrolls and to pioneer the microlevel of individual scribes to open access to the Bible’s ancient scribal culture. We report new evidence for a breaking point in the series of columns in this scroll. Without prior assumption of writer identity, based on point clouds of the reduced-dimensionality feature-space, we found that columns from the first and second halves of the manuscript ended up in two distinct zones of such scatter plots, notably for a range of digital palaeography tools, each addressing very different featural aspects of the script samples. In a secondary, independent, analysis, now assuming writer difference and using yet another independent feature method and several different types of statistical testing, a switching point was found in the column series. A clear phase transition is apparent in columns 27–29. We also demonstrated a difference in distance variances such that the variance is higher in the second part of the manuscript. Given the statistically significant differences between the two halves, a tertiary, post-hoc analysis was performed using visual inspection of character heatmaps and of the most discriminative Fraglet sets in the script. Demonstrating that two main scribes, each showing different writing patterns, were responsible for the Great Isaiah Scroll, this study sheds new light on the Bible’s ancient scribal culture by providing new, tangible evidence that ancient biblical texts were not copied by a single scribe only but that multiple scribes, while carefully mirroring another scribe’s writing style, could closely collaborate on one particular manuscript.

“I Am Like a Lost Child”: L2 Writers' Linguistic Metaphors as a Window Into Their Writer Identity

The past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning literature on L2 writers' identities, especially their discoursal identities. In contrast, little attention is paid to the writers' felt sense of self when they write in an L2, which is an integral dimension of their autobiographical self. In this article, we provide empirical evidence of the nature of this aspect of L2 writer identity. To illustrate, we analyzed linguistic metaphors elicited from three groups of L2 writers (N = 83), majoring respectively in Thai, Japanese, and English in a Chinese university. Descriptive analysis shows that, due to challenges in content, language, organization, and cultural differences, a majority of L2 writers, especial Thai and Japanese L2 writers, experience a diminishing sense of self when they write in L2. In contrast, some L2 writers, especially English L2 writers, find writing in an L2 liberating, revealing the impact of their individual learning trajectories and pedagogical practices on L2 writers' felt sense of self. Findings suggest that L2 writers' identity work is both complex and dynamic. L2 writing teachers can utilize the metaphor questionnaire as a tool to facilitate their learner needs analysis and to raise L2 writers' metacognition.