Constructing an effective identity in academic writing is considered crucial in establishing a favourable reader-writer relationship; in eliciting a positive reader response to the text and even in developing a convincing argument (Hyland, 2004). But different expectations of authorial presence in academic writing between disciplines, and even changing notions within disciplines, present student learners of academic literacy with difficulties. These difficulties are increased for students writing in English as an additional language (EAL), especially when they are exposed simultaneously to more than one discipline-specific literacy. This paper looks at the writing of an EAL learner of academic literacy in a foundation course in literature in the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. Clark and Ivanic's (1997) model of the aspects of writer identity (autobiographical self, self as author and discoursal self) is used to analyse the student's writing and to understand her sense of her writer identity. I argue that, despite this student's lack of awareness of the effects of her linguistic choices on writer identity, her heightened sense of self as flexible and changing while she straddles more than one culture and language, could provide ways for helping students to understand better the construction of identity in academic writing.

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Competence in academic literacy is still the main route to access and achievement within the university. First year students are expected to learn a number of discipline specific academic literacies with frequently conflicting and unarticulated uses of academic conventions. Through the analysis of the introductory paragraphs of one student in a literature foundation course, this article focuses on whether and how this student copes with the different demands presented by the simultaneous learning of different academic literacies. The analysis provides information about how this student built her understanding of academic literacy and her strategies for learning. The examination of her techniques and the need to explain why they are appropriate or not in a literature essay forced reflection on the thinking in the discipline that underlies such judgements.