A comparative analysis of identity construction in digital academic discourse: Tunisian EFL students as a case study

The value of academic research does not only reside in the observations and the conclusions it reaches but also in the scientific debate it raises within a community of interest (Swales 1990; Gosden 1992; Vallis 2010; Nackoney/Munn/Fernandez 2011). Doing academic research online through digital media takes academic discourse from the immediate and local research context to a wider and more heterogeneous community. The examination of written papers in different contexts might reveal something about the way writing is perceived by the writer. The present paper compares and contrasts interactional metadiscourse use in both traditional and digital academic discourse following Hyland’s (2005) model of METADISCOURSE. A corpus of ten MA dissertations as an example of traditional communication and ten internship reports as an example of digital communication written by Tunisian EFL students is examined. A qualitative and quantitative analysis is carried out using the Text Inspector web tool and manual annotation. The results reveal that, except for boosters, the use of interactional markers significantly differs across the media. The overall tone that METADISCOURSE use creates in dissertation writing reflects an audience-centered way of meaning-making while digital communication is distinguished by a stronger writer authorial presence.