If you can defend your own point of view, you're good: Norms of voice construction in student writing on an international Master's programme

Abstract

This ethnographically oriented study followed the writing experiences of four students on an international masters programme in Finland. Gathering a range of data, the study set out to examine what counts as good writing on a programme with a very diverse student body in which English is used as a lingua franca. Both teachers and students emphasised the importance of arguing one's ‘own point of view’ in academic writing, and teachers often formed impressions of students on the basis of their texts, drawing attention particularly to their use of metadiscourse markers (e.g., self-mentions, attitude markers and hedges). The present article therefore combines a quantitative analysis of students' use of metadiscourse in their papers with qualitative analysis of the voice types they construed in their texts and the ways in which their practices were perceived. The analysis found that students' use of metadiscourse varied from text to text, and they construed strikingly different voice types in their writing. Based on interview and journal data, their practices seemed to be influenced by their experiences of the classroom and teacher, as well as their disciplinary backgrounds. Teachers seemed to prefer the voice of a detached cultural analyst, with fewer explicit expressions of the writer's stance. However, they also drew on their impressions of the individual student's learning and on images of cultural norms in interpreting their practices.