A Contrastive Study Of Writer Identity In English Academic Papers

Academic writing has traditionally been viewed as purely objective, thus personal pronouns should be avoided in academic papers. Recent research, however, has suggested that academic writing need not be totally devoid of writer's presence, and that the notion of writer identity has increasingly been a focus of study. Early studies of academic writing usually chose articles written by expert writers as data. Corpus-based studies of expert academic discourse no doubt provide valuable information for syllabus and teaching material design. However, as several researchers point out, studies based on the analysis of expert corpora are not enough to inform the design of English for Academic Purpose (EAP) teaching materials and must be complemented with studies which make a contrast with students' papers. And contrastive studies can reveal some of the main problems that learners may have when writing academic essays. Till now, there is a scarcity of research which compares writer identity or authorial presence through self-mention in academic writing of learners and expert writers.The present study made a contrastive study which aimed to explore the notion of writer identity through self-mention in English academic papers written by expert writers and Chinese postgraduates. This research was based on two self-compiled corpora, namely the postgraduate theses corpus and the journal articles corpus (abbreviated as PT corpus and JA corpus), which consisted of 56 English research papers of empirical studies (20 in PT corpus and 36 in JA corpus) (400,000 words in total) from the field of linguistics and applied linguistics. It focused on the overall frequency of different forms of self-mention, the writer identities performed by self-mention forms, the semantic references of first person plural pronouns.The major findings are:1) there are frequent occurrences of self-mention use in both corpora, though the occurrences are relatively more in JA corpus than in PT corpus; 2) while Chinese postgraduates prefer self-mention items and first person plural pronouns in their writings, expert writers prefer first person singular pronouns in their papers; 3) there are six kinds of semantic references of first person plural pronouns found in the PT corpus, including 'writers','writers and readers','the discipline as a whole','people in general','researchers and subject','writers and co-researchers', with the last two replaced by 'writers and peer researchers', and 'the' research team' in the JA corpus; 4) nine identities realized through self-mention use are identified and ordered along a continuum that were divided into three levels in terms of writers' presence in the current study. There are more occurrences of writer identities except identities of relatively low writer's presence in JA corpus than that in PT corpus.To conclude, Chinese postgraduates construct a relatively weaker writer identity than expert writers in English academic writing. The distinction can attribute to several reasons, involving psychological, cultural, and social factors (especially writer's background) that contain elements of confidence, collectivism and authority, etc.