Authorial presence in L1 and L2 novice academic writing: Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives

What is it about?

This study involved a corpus-based textual analysis of authorial presence markers in the argumentative essays of Turkish and American students. Utilising Hyland's interactional metadiscourse model (2005a) as the analysis framework, it aimed to compare the features of stance in L1 and L2 essays by Turkish learners of English with those in essays by monolingual American students. Also, discourse-based interviews with ten students contributed to an understanding of the use of markers in their L1 and L2 writing. The results indicate that the use of authorial presence markers in English essays by Turkish students was more similar to the use of these markers in writing by novice native English-speaking students than to the use of markers in the Turkish students' own writing in Turkish. The textual and interview data are discussed in relation to writing instruction, L1 writing conventions, and the institutional context.

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