* WITHDRAWN * Students' Authorial Identity from Cote and Levine's (2002) Personality and Social Structure Perspective

College students are supported by tutors and lecturers to understand and learn the particular discourses that represent their disciplines. Such understandings may affect the ways that they generally write. Authorial identity... [ view full abstract ]

College students are supported by tutors and lecturers to understand and learn the particular discourses that represent their disciplines. Such understandings may affect the ways that they generally write. Authorial identity according to Ivanić (1998) is the way writers represent themselves in their texts as well as in the sociocultural contexts of writing. Ivanić argues that authorial identity is under the influence of writers’ particular background history, voice, and their responsibility for the contents of the texts they write. In academic writing and writing for specific purposes, the term ‘authorial identity’ has been conceptualized and used in a number of different ways. Some researchers focused on the link between source use and textual identity, highlighting that plagiarism happens when novice writers fail to present themselves as the authors of their own texts. In tertiary education research also, there is growing literature documenting authorial identity. However, we still have much to learn about the development of authorial identity among newbie writers. This paper draws from a research study into the development of authorial identity as college studnets among international students in an English-medium college in New Zealand. I used Côté and Levine’s (2002) Personality and Social Structure Perspective (PSSP) to investigate the interconnection between individualized agency, social norms, interaction between college students and their surrounding environment, and the unique authorial identity that these students have or imagine for themselves. The study used multiple semi-structured interviews to collect information from several students about their experiences of academic writing and their perceptions about its development. By attending to the writing experiences of the participants of the study, the findings illustrated a hybrid identity construction among the focused novice writers that was basically built on genre analysis, trial and error in the practices of academic writing, and discussions with peers, tutors, academic writing advisors, and lecturers. In exploring the trial and error in the practices of academic writing that the participants used, they described how particular writing strategies allowed them to feel their identities as good students. This investigation showed that explicit guidance from tutors and lecturers, may actively contribute to students’ authorial identity.