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Development and Validation of a Robust Model and Questionnaire of Authorial Identity: A Multiphase Study of Authorial Identity

Jamshidi, Saman | 2018

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: English
  3. Document No: 51337 (31)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Languages and Linguistics Center
  6. Advisor(s): Rezaei, Saeed; Dehqan, Mahmood
  7. Abstract:
  8. With the considerable increase in academic publications and ever-growing concern for academic writing, academic literacy, and plagiarism in recent years, investigating academic writers’ ‘authorial identity’ and ‘authorial voice’ has been of utmost importance in academic milieu. The main purposes of this study were achieved by going through five main phases including 1) hypothesizing a model of authorial identity, 2) developing and validating a questionnaire based on the model, 3) testing the model based on the questionnaire data, 4) searching for possible significant difference in authorial identity of academic writers from three different fields of English, Biology, and Engineering, and 5) conducting a corpus study as a complementary phase for investigating the effect of disciplinary conventions on academic writers’ stance taking in their research articles. In this study, there were 30 respondents for the initial piloting, 60 for the reliability phase, 140 for the exploratory factor analysis, 175 for confirmatory factor analysis, and 150 for the main survey administration. The corpus of the current study was also comprised of 60 articles from three different fields of English, Biology, and Engineering. First, a model of authorial identity was developed based on Ivanič’s (1998) model who considered autobiographical self, discoursal self, and self as author as the main aspects of authorial identity. Second, to develop and validate the questionnaire based on the new model, I went through a number of stages namely, item pool generation, piloting, reliability estimation, and validation. The reliability of the questionnaire estimated through Cronbach’s alpha was 0.78. Accordingly, exploratory factor analysis identified a latent model with four factors, viz. authorial voice and identity, authorial role, authorial background, and authorial style. Third, in the confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling via AMOS was employed to test the model and the results showed that the four-factor model was fit. In the fourth phase, the authorial voice and identity questionnaire, developed and validated by the current researcher, was administered to 150 academic writers, 50 from each of the selected fields. Following that, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run to locate the significant difference between authorial identity of academic writers among these groups. Accordingly, the results of ANOVA and post-hoc test revealed a significant difference in the authorial identity of academic writers from the fields of English, Biology, and Engineering in a way that academic writers from the English field differed significantly from academic writers from the Biology and Engineering groups who did not differ significantly from each other. Finally, Hyland’s (2005) model of interaction in academic discourse was applied to analyze academic writers’ stance taking in a corpus comprising of 60 articles from three selected fields. Triangulating the findings, the results indicated that the English group had a higher level of stance markers in comparison to Biology and Engineering groups. Ergo, it was concluded that academic writers in the soft fields rely more on authority, self-representation, and personal projection, while scientists and engineers efface themselves from their texts and try to portray their findings impersonally in their academic writing
  9. Keywords:
  10. Validity ; Reliability ; Author Identification ; Structural Equations Modeling ; Authorial Identity Model ; Authorial Voice ; Authorial Stance

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