Liberating second language writers: An exploration of multilingual writer identity in Türkiye

Academic writing in a second language calls for the negotiation of writers' identities in constant interaction with their autobiographical past and the learning context. The present study aims to investigate the ways in which novice academic writers in the Turkish EFL context construct and negotiate their identities and mark their authorial presence in the texts. The participants were 114 Turkish university students studying at the Intensive English Program of a large university in Türkiye. In this mixed design study, we adopted an explanatory sequential design in the collection and analysis of data, which were gleaned from these students' writing samples, retrospective interviews conducted with twelve of the participants and realia from the learning context. By conducting text analyses through ART ANOVA, we compared L2 writers' use of personal pronouns and graduation markers across two genres (argumentative essays and discussion boards) to examine the effects of authorial presence feature and publicity of discourse. Overall, the results revealed that L2 novice writers adopted avoidance strategies towards the use of authorial presence markers and refrained from manifesting their identity explicitly in their texts. There was a significant main effect of genre between the argumentative essays and discussion board entries while the use of personal pronouns and graduation markers lacked statistical significance. This indicated that students, especially shy ones, preferred to mark their identity more visibly when the discourse was not public to the whole class, and genre played an important role in the students' self-involvement in academic writing.