The construction of writer identity of Bangladeshi L2 students in the English academic community

• Main Author: Saha, Suma
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2014
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/46602

This study was conducted to investigate how five Bangladeshi L2 graduate students construct and express their writer identities in their L2 academic writing practices in English academic community. The study is based upon feminist poststructuralism, especially Weedon’s (1997) concept of subjectivity portraying the individual as uncertain, contradictory, dynamic, and changing over historical time and social space. I conducted semi-structured interviews and collected writing samples of the participants. Following Ivanič’s (1998) concept of writer identity which bears multiplicity with four interrelated aspects of autobiographical self, discoursal self, self as author, and possibilities for self-hood, I analyzed the data thematically to illustrate how participants constructed their writer identities. Findings suggest that the participating Bangladeshi student writers tried to construct their autobiographical selves by drawing on previous literacy practices. However, it was their field of study (science or arts) that allowed or restricted them from expressing their individual interest, experiences, opinions and commitment in their L2 writing. Participants also constructed their discoursal selves through citations practices, linguistics choices, and organization of their papers as they tried to accommodate to the discourses preferred by their field of study or professors. In addition, the science and non-science major students expressed themselves as authors differently by employing either personal or impersonal writing styles and by making claims following different disciplinary conventions. It was clearly the participants’ awareness of the possibilities of self-hood that influenced how they constructed their writer identities. Such identities, as the study illustrate, were multiple, shifted, conflicted, and developed as participants tried to align themselves with the preferred identities or possibilities in the English academic community. The paper concludes with teaching implications for academic writing in a second language.