Identity Formation in Second Language Writing: Models of Metadiscourse

Introduction

The increasing expansion in the number of students studying abroad implies the diversity of students attending the universities, including ethnicity and age (Coffin et al., 2003; Hyland, 2006). More specifically, the diversity of cultural and social backgrounds, the students’ academic needs, and the linguistic diversities of non-native speakers of English entail students’ varieties in their identities, understanding, and learning (Lillis, 2001; Coffin, et al., 2003). This casts more responsibility on the shoulder of the university academic staff and represents significant challenges for them in teaching second language writing due to several reasons. Among these challenges is that the concept of academic language is unfamiliar to the non-native speakers of English (Manjet, 2016) during the high school period (Hyland, 2006), as well as students’ interpretation and understanding will be different (Coffin, et al., 2003). Consequently, universities require staff with specific training and skills to cope with students’ needs, particularly students’ writing in English, which has become the international language of research (Bruce, 2008). In addition, publishing in English has increased worldwide recently (Ferguson et al., 2011), including not only countries with English as the official language or the first language but also those with English as the Second Language (ESL) or English as the Foreign Language (EFL), either as a personal choice or as a necessity (Tang, 2012). Thus, it can be argued that these kinds of developments represent rational reasons to unpack the academic discourse (Hyland, 2011), particularly the issue of the writer’s identity. Writing is concerned not only with communicating the content but also with the representation of self. Writers can achieve credibility by means of projecting their identity, thus revealing confidence, certainty, probability, usuality or commitment. This raises the issue of teaching students when and how to project this identity while communicating their ideas in L2 writing.

Analysing discourses represents a strategy to study language in action or examine a text within its social context. The research in the area of academic genres could demonstrate the varied ways and strategies adopted by the writers in different disciplines (Hyland, 2009; Hyland, 2016). The writer’s stance towards the arguments should be ‘appropriate’ and of ‘acceptable voice’ (Hyland, 2008, p.7, 2011, p.9; Bloch, 2010). However, lack of evaluation (Petric`, 2007; Monreal & Salom, 2011), difficulty, neutrality, and ambiguity in adopting an attitude by the writer can be attributed to the influence of the writer’s native language, its academic culture (Rowley-Jolivet & Carter-Thomas, 2014) and a cross-cultural variation (Jalilifar & Dabbi, 2012). Novice writers’ dependence on conversational words and ‘fancy’ verbs in academic writing (Lang, 2004; Monreal & Salom, 2011; Nguyen & Pramoolsook, 2015) reflects a non-academic perspective and might taint a fact or a piece of information with subjectivity (Parkinson, 2013). Writing is central to our personal experience and social identities (Hyland, 2005). However, due to lack of theoretical rigour and empirical explicitness of the use of metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005), this chapter explores how identity is formed in L2 writing by discussing models that have addressed identity, particularly Halliday’s (1985) modality and Hyland’s (1998b, 1998c, 1999b) model. This linguistic comparison of varied models could contribute to the field of teaching L2 writing to ESL/EFL learners by highlighting the implicit meanings of metadiscourse and linguistic devices in order to employ them appropriately and avoid using them randomly at the same time.