An Investigation into Author s Foreign Versus Native Identity through Discourse Analysis

Nonnative English writers in spite of professionalism, unconsciously or for lack of knowledge usually transfer the concept in an ambiguous and syntactically deformed way in written form. This research was aimed to analyze native and non-native English writer’s identity through their written research article. This is also strived to explain the clues by which the native or foreign identity of an author can be revealed. Then 8 academic research articles were selected from Iranian academic writers on the teaching and linguistics subjects, as corpus for Non-native written discourse, and 8 Non-native Azeri English writers of research articles were selected randomly from Iranian journal of Language Teaching and Research since 2000 to 2015.The papers were normalized on Biber corpus design method, and were divided into 6 sections on the basis of 6 different registers. Two corpuses of non-native written English were compiled. And native English writer’s articles were extracted from the American Journal of linguistics. The texts were analyzed regarding the linguistic expression, word choice, composing strategies, reasoning methods, use of rhetoric, concept confusion, translation, first language use and switching. The written articles differ from the other collection of research articles written by native speakers’ use of L1 language and strategic choice of words, cohesive devices, and even switching or even through use of rhetoric by first language origins. In order to show the differences through data analysis of the corpus, extraction of data from the texts and break down of the content in search of word choice, strategy use and rhetoric were done through reading and coding the texts on practicing the scales .Results show that context denotatively in linguistic features and connotatively through strategic and rhetoric reveals the non-native writer’s identity. The research concluded that Concept confusion was created by formal and syntactical dysfunction to readers which were created by writers.

Keywords:

Native , Foreign/non-native , Identity , Discourse analysis