Students’ voice in essayist prose: A longitudinal and emic approach to positioning

The acquisition of academic writing poses challenges for students, who are often provided with little guidance. This article aims to analyze student writing in the early years of university education with a longitudinal perspective, focusing on a student genre – the essay – that is ubiquitous in academia, but roughly defined and rarely problematized. An emic approach, complemented with quantifications of usage, is used to address the emergence of discursive resources of positioning that contribute to the construction of voice in academic writing. A sample of eight students enrolled in social sciences and humanities programs at a Chilean university who participated in a three-year study was selected, to analyze the emergence of voice and positioning while contributing to the description of metadiscourse in Spanish. The results show that almost all uses of metadiscourse increase or become more sophisticated over time, but few do so in a statistically significant way. In addition, participants adhere to simplified views about academic writing, which lead them to believe that positioning should be avoided. Consequently, tensions emerge between the desire to express their voice and to meet the expectations of essayist prose. The findings offer clues about the potential of teaching metadiscourse to develop a metalinguistic mastery of resources and promote greater agency and the expression of voice in academic writing.