The focus of undergraduate academic writing programmes has predominantly been on clarity in the expression of ideas. Writer’s positionality typically gets little attention or is downplayed in favour of teaching the academic genre and mechanics of writing. Using an interdisciplinary course that adopts the CLIL approach designed for first-year undergraduates at residential colleges at the National University of Singapore (NUS) as a case study, this paper examines the emergent writer identity of students in their research writing task. Students who enrol in this course come from different disciplines and may have varying levels of proficiency in English which makes it necessary to adopt an individualized and bottom-up approach to addressing issues in language proficiency (Brooke, 2018). Following Hyland’s (2002) approach to investigating writer’s identity, data for this study are gathered from student drafts and final submission in which the use of first-person pronouns is examined. Preliminary observations reveal that language proficiency and writer’s identity are not necessarily correlated which then underscores the need to foreground writer’s positionality in academic writing classes.

Authors:
Yurni Said-Sirhan, University of Singapore, Singapore

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Yurni Said-Sirhan is currently an Instructor at the Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore. Her current research project with a colleague is on developing a framework for teaching literature review writing.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

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