Audience Awareness, Identity Construction, and Citation Behavior in Arabic and EFL Research

Abstract

Citations represent an integral interpersonal component of writer-reader dialogic interaction in academic discourse. One under-researched question in citation literature concerns the role of audience as a contextual factor that impacts writers’ citation choices and the nature of the identity and disciplinary knowledge that they construct. The present study adopts a multidimensional analytical approach within a discourse analytic, case-study research design. First, it aims to investigate the citation behavior of five education scholars who are writing research in modern standard Arabic. Second, it examines whether these writers would modify their intertextual style to enact different identity and disciplinary community when writing in English as a foreign language (EFL). Findings revealed a unique character for the Arabic-based citation behavior that contrasted, sometimes, markedly with conventional academic norms, indicating the pivotal role that culture plays in shaping rhetorical preferences. Arabic-based tendencies involved predominance of integral subjective citations, use of combined citations and non-citations, and reliance on what is herein termed intertextual saturation and diffused intertextuality as rhetorical strategies to persuade audience and contract dialogic space. The findings also showed marginal modification of intertextual style in the EFL texts, suggesting lack of significant orientation toward target audiences’ characteristics that would have resulted from enculturation into disciplinary community. The findings imply the overriding need to introduce novice writers to the concept of audience if they are to produce academic discourse that would be deemed interpersonally optimal from the perspective of the international discourse community.