Writer/reader visibility in learner writing across genres: A comparison of the French and Norwegian components of the ICLE and VESPA learner corpora

Previous studies have shown that learner writing is often characterized by a more involved style than the writing of their native peers, as evidenced by a high number of writer/reader (W/R) visibility features such as first and second person pronouns, let’s imperatives, epistemic modal adverbs (e.g. certainly, maybe) and questions (cf. e.g. Petch-Tyson 1998, Altenberg and Tapper 1998). The aim of this study is to analyse French and Norwegian learners’ use of W/R visibility features across genres, comparing argumentative texts from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) with discipline-specific texts from the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA), to investigate whether learners are generally more overtly present within their academic writing or whether the features commonly attributed to EFL learners’ involved style are prompted by the argumentative type of texts that has usually been analysed in learner corpus research. Results show that, when compared to native speakers’ writing within the same discipline, texts produced by French and Norwegian learners display an overuse of W/R visibility features. There are, however, generally fewer features of W/R visibility in the discipline-specific texts, thus suggesting that learners adapt to genre requirements to some extent