About

Given the current education-migration context of UK higher education, multilingual students are often strongly encouraged to adapt to the Anglophone academic environments with blueprints for writing conventions and practices set by native speakers. This traditional approach puts certain multilingual students' language and academic literacy practices at stake while potentially creating differences, exclusion and social injustices. Hence, an inclusive conceptualisation of authorial voice in multilingual students' academic writing is amongst the most fundamental concerns to ensure social justice for all students.

Authorial voice is a most determining construct of success in academic writing that helps writers establish the value of their arguments and scholarly contributions. However, authorial voice remains a highly contested concept, which influences the construction of existing models attempting to represent it. To address this, the proposed research aims to contribute to the contemporary literature a new model conceptualising students' authorial voice that takes multilingual students' discursive resources into consideration. In other words, this project will result in the first empirical investigation of an academic practice conceptualisation that moves away from employing native speakers’ practices as yardsticks in academic writing.

In achieving the goals mentioned above, I seek to raise academic attention towards how multilingual students deploy their discursive resources, hence driving the adoption of a new and more inclusive academic writing assessment and education approach. This research is significant because it speaks for a less-represented group of students in the UK. Consequently, this project would support international students to be better recognised in UK Anglophone universities for their success, thus leading to a more diverse academic environment.