Authorial Identity and Objectivity: A Hungarian EFL Perspective on Academic Writing

As students in higher education advance in their studies over the course of their university years, it becomes more and more crucial that they develop an authorial identity. However, in Hungarian tertiary education students are urged by their tutors they adopt an impersonal style in their written essays. Struggling to meet institutional standards, they cannot construct their own writerly identities. Nevertheless, an objective presentation of ideas does not necessarily prevent Hungarian EFL university students from incorporating their personalities into their writing. Therefore, Hungarian EFL students must be equipped with the linguistic devices to make their voices heard. This essay seeks to propose that the insistence on objectivity in English academic writing does not inhibit Hungarian EFL university students from assuming their academic writer identity.

First, there have been several studies conducted that indicated that there is great room for individuality in academic writing. According to Hutton et al. (2019, pp. 105-111), many students perceive academic writing as an opportunity to generate their ideas and transcend beyond the institutional constraints set by their universities. The authors contended that scholarly writers tend to split personal tone into two halves as either impersonal, usually found in academic texts, or personal typically emerging in creative writing. Yet, as respondents in the study pointed out, there is a third category of writing that blends formulaic and informal writing into a single piece. This allows university students to adopt a personal tone, for example in their written assignments, that simultaneously aligns with the requirements set by their universities. By weaving together, the two ends of the spectrum, they can display great flexibility of registers and adjust their language to the specific task they are required to produce. With this in mind, they can operate effectively in an academic context and develop their authorial persona. Still, as Flowerdew et al. (2015, pp. 89-90) noted, EFL learners need to confront linguistic barriers that gravely affect their ability to navigate effectively between personal tones.

Second, in another study Hyland (2002) highlighted that language deficiency can easily be addressed through awareness raising that specifically focuses on EAP writing. This equips EFL learners with linguistic tools to articulate their own ideas, gain control over their language and eventually assert their writer identity. Similarly, in Hungarian research carried out, Hungarian EFL learners also need to assert their writer persona to represent their views on certain issues adequately (Károly, 2009). In her study, she investigated Hungarian EFL students' use of author pronouns in MA thesis papers. The results of her study, in parallel to the findings of Hyland, indicated that academic writing needs not to be impersonal and students should not “leave their personalities at the door” (p. 351). During the research, she subjected two corpora of texts to careful analysis and found that student writers used personal pronouns more frequently than expert writers. As she concluded, even though students were aware of the stylistic conventions of academic writing, these were not reflected in their papers. She demonstrated in her paper through manifold examples that Hungarian EFL students tend to not use personal markers in their appropriate rhetorical functions. Therefore, EAP courses should place more emphasis on helping Hungarian EFL students gain a stronger command of English so that they can use these linguistic devices with precision and sophistication.

Third, academic writing offers authors a variety of personal markers with the help of which authors can promote their belief systems through their rhetorical choices. These linguistic devices include evidentials, hedges, boosters, self-mention and attitude markers, all of which play a profound role in identity construction through metadiscourse (Rahimivand et al., 2015). They have proven useful tools in the hands of academic writers; presumably Hungarian EFL university students may also find them of great help. As a Hungarian EFL learner, whose L2 is English, I have found personal markers immensely useful as I regularly post academic articles and essays on my blog site. Blogging has emerged as a recent genre – thanks to the proliferation of the Internet – and it is designed to foster creativity and personal voice. (Flowerdew et al., 2015, pp. 87-89). It offers me an informal platform and helps me create my authorial identity.

In light of the analysis above, the insistence on objectivity in English academic writing does not inhibit Hungarian EFL university students from assuming their academic writer identity. In fact, it widens their perspectives and provides them with a variety of alternatives to articulate their arguments in the academic context.

 

References

Flowerdew, J., & Wang, S. H. (2015). Identity in academic discourse. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 81–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026719051400021X

Hyland, K. (2002). Options of identity in academic writing. ELT Journal, 56(4), 351–358. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/56.4.351

Hutton, L., & Gibson, G. (2019). “Kinds of writing”: Student conceptions of academic and creative forms of writing development. In A. R. Gere (Ed.), Developing writers in higher education: A longitudinal study (pp. 89–112). University of Michigan Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvdjrpt3.9

Károly, K. (2009). Author identity in English academic discourse: A comparison of expert and Hungarian EFL student writing, Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 56(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1556/aling.56.2009.1.1

Rahimivand, M., & Kuhi, D. (2015). An exploration of discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences. 98, 1492 – 1501. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.570