Authorial stance/voice and L2 academic writing: A systematic literature review

Authorial stance constructs interpersonal meanings of texts, and establishing authorial stances appropriately between the intended audience and the writer is pivotal for successful communication. Scholars have presented frameworks such as the interpersonal metadiscourse model and the appraisal framework, and explicated English linguistic resources for writers to employ when taking authorial stances. Construing authorial stances for English for academic purposes is a major challenge to ESL/EFL writers in higher education. To investigate the uses and challenges of authorial stances among ESL/EFL writers in higher education, we conducted a systematic literature review of research studies. We analyzed 72 empirical articles published from 2000 to 2024 in applied linguistics, L2 writing, and TESOL. The findings suggest that most studies were conducted in EFL contexts employing mixed or quantitative methods and compared authorial stances in a corpus of essays to report patterns, types, and frequencies among different groups such as high and low graded writers. Longitudinal studies were rarely conducted to monitor students’ development of metalinguistic awareness after pedagogical instruction. The writing of ESL/EFL writers in higher education was either over-assertive or lacking authority due to limited metalinguistic awareness of contexts and genres. Few pedagogical strategies were used to express authorial stances appropriately for registers in discipline-specific genres of academic writing.