چکیده:
Academic writing is not just about presenting a set of ideas, but through the act of writing, the authors position themselves as individuals having particular identities which mostly reflect the dominant sociocultural values and practices of the discourse communities in which they are living and performing. The present study, using a mixed method approach, attempted to explore the evidences of voice and subject positioning, as reflections of authorial identity, in the argumentative writings of 41 advanced Iranian EFL learners. At first, the relationship between voice intensity and overall writing quality of the participants was assessed and the results indicated a positive relationship between the constructs. The multiple regression analysis conducted also revealed that assertiveness, as one of the main subcomponents of voice in writing, had the highest level of contribution in accounting for the writing competence of the learners. Afterwards, some representative instances of subject-positioning (i.e., ideational, interpersonal and textual) in the written texts were identified and discussed based on the ideological context of the study since it is believed that authorial identity and voice can vividly reflect the overall ideology of the specific discourse community in which they are constructed. Finally, it was suggested that raising the awareness of learners and even instructing them about the significance of authorial identity, voice and subject-positioning in writing can assist them in constructing more authentic texts in terms of idea presentation, consideration of readers and specific textual and linguistic features used.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Exploring Authorial Identity in terms of Voice Intensity and Subject- Positioning in the Argumentative Writings of Male and Female Iranian Advanced EFL Learners Omid Mallahi * Assistant Professor of English Language Teaching Group, University of Hormozgan Received: 2019/04/07 Accepted: 2019/05/27 Abstract: Academic writing is not just about presenting a set of ideas, but through the act of writing, the authors position themselves as individuals having particular identities which mostly reflect the dominant sociocultural values and practices of the discourse communities in which they are living and performing.
Some researchers working in the field of L1 and L2 composition studies have argued that voice in the written texts expresses the essential individuality and unique socially-constructed identity of the writer and is an important quality of good writing (Hyland, 2002; Ivanič, 1998; Ivanič & Camps, 2001; Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Stock & Eik-Nes, 2016; Tardy, 2012).
In second language (L2) writing instruction, voice has received peripheral attention and has not been considered as an important aspect in teaching writing due to reasons such as L2 learners‟ greater need to develop syntactic or lexical skills than voice-related skills and conceptualization of this notion as being based on an individualistic identity, which values emphatic, revelatory writing requiring assertiveness and candor, that might not be appropriate for learners with collectively-oriented cultural backgrounds (Helms-Park & Stapleton, 2003; Hirvela & Belcher, 2001; Matsuda, 2001) who mostly engage in communicative acts which value “the subtle, interpretive, interdependent, non-assertive, and even non-verbal [features]”(Ramanathan & Atkinson,1999, p.