Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language: a handbook for Supervisors

Second-language academic writing and identity
Writer identity is a key issue in written academic discourse, and especially
thesis and dissertation writing. This is a particularly difficult issue for many
second-language writers. Academic writing is often presented to students as
something that is faceless and impersonal. Students are told, for example, ‘to
leave their personalities at the door’ (Hyland 2002: 352) and not to use per-
sonal pronouns such as ‘I’ which show what is being said is the student’s view

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or place in things. As Hyland points out, however, ‘almost everything we
write says something about us and the sort of relationship that we want to set
up with our readers’. Establishing writer identity is often difficult for second-
language writers. This is further complicated by students having a different
way of writing and different ‘voice’ in their first-language academic writing
(see Hirvela and Belcher 2001 for further discussion of this).
Prince (2000) looked at the issue of writer identity in second-language
thesis writing. Her interest was in the ways in which second-language writers
might be influenced (or not) by their experience of having written a thesis in
their first language and culture. She looked at the experiences of a group of
Chinese and Polish students, all of whom had written a thesis in their first
language prior to writing a thesis in English. She found a major theme that
emerged in her study was whether the students had to give up, or change,
their personal identity in order to write a successful thesis in English. Prince
tells how one of her Polish students, Ilona, fiercely fought to retain her per-
sonal and individual style of writing, but in the end found she had to give
this away in order to pass.
Bartolome (1998: xiii) argues that learning to succeed in western academic
settings is not just a matter of language, but of knowing the ‘linguistically
contextualised language’ of the particular discourse that is valued in the par-
ticular academic setting. Many students find this a difficult thing to do. They
may fear a loss of cultural identity and not wish to be ‘drowned’ in the new
academic culture. Ilona, the Polish student in Prince’s study, felt exactly this.
Other student experiences reported on in the research literature, however,
have been slightly different. A Chinese student, for example, in Shen’s (1989)
study felt that learning to write in a new way added another dimension to
himself and to his view of the world. This did not mean, he said, that he had
lost his Chinese identity. Indeed, he said, he would never lose this. Students
do, however, have to learn to write in a way that is often new and different for
them and have to balance their new identity with their old one. This is as
much about cultural views of writing as it is about new and different rela-
tionships between student writers with their new and imagined readers, their
supervisors and their examiners. As Silva and Matsuda point out, writing is
always embedded in a complex web of relationships between writers and
readers. These relationships, further, are constantly changing. As they argue:
the writer’s task is not as simple as constructing an accurate representa-
tion of reality; the writer also has to negotiate, through the construction
of the text, his or her own view of these elements of writing with the
views held by the readers.
(Silva and Matsuda 2002: 253)
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Introduction

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Student writers, then:
do not write in isolation but within networks of more and less powerfully
situated colleagues and community members. They learn to forge
alliances with those community members with whom they share values
or whom they perceive will benefit them in some way and to resist when
accommodating does not suit them.
(Casanave 2002: xiii–xiv)
These are all factors that influence what a student writes and how they posi-
tion themselves in relation to what they write.
A further complication is that some students may come from backgrounds
where they have considerable standing in their field of study and find it diffi-
cult to be told they need to take on the voice of a novice academic writer as
they write in their second language. Hirvela and Belcher (2001) discuss this
issue, arguing that we need to know more about the ways our students pre-
sent themselves in their first-language writing, and about their first-language
and culture identities, so we can help them deal with the issue of identity in
their second-language academic writing. The issue of writer identity, thus, is
important and is a theme we return to in later chapters of this book.
Introduction
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