Authorial presence in English academic texts : a comparative study of student writing across cultures and disciplines

This book presents a case study of student-writers from multiple cultural and academic backgrounds. It investigates how writing, as an act of identity, can be analyzed along an axis of individual and social influences. This continuum entails a number of related perspectives, including the ways in which individuals reproduce or challenge dominant literary practices and discourses, and how they occupy the subject positions made available in their discourse communities. The analysis of the findings draws on selected socio-semiotic and more broadly, anthropological views of language, which are then synthesized into a multi-aspect model of academic writer identity.