"In this paper I will prove …" : the challenge behind authorial self-representation in L2 undergraduate research paper writing

Developing expertise in EAP writing is a time-consuming endeavour, entailing not only mastery of advanced language forms and functions, but also extensive domain knowledge accumulated through interaction with a large body of reading material. By way of practice, academic writing assignments engage students with textual input from multiple sources to be synthesized, analysed, critically evaluated, responded to and, ultimately, creatively transformed. Writers of academic prose are then not only expected to provide an objective account of the data and perspectives of experts, but also to position themselves in relation to them and mark their own presence in the discourse they create. The experience of many practitioners has shown that projecting one’s own identity in the process of developing a thesis, especially when working with source texts in L2 as reference is one of the most challenging academic literacy tasks for novice writers. Discrepancies between L1 and L2 writing cultures, the learners’ status in the academic discourse community and their rigid conceptions of academic writing, often enhanced by inconsistent advice offered by instructional materials, might contribute to the excessive dependence of inexperienced L2 writers on source material and to linguistic choices which reduce their agency. This paper looks into the distribution, rhetorical functions and semantic connotations offirst person pronouns employed as identity signals by undergraduate students in source-based research papers