112 REVIEWS

study of their field, and which have therefore brought them to this book.
By harnessing practitioners’ experience in this way, the author activates and
extends engagement with the chapter content. The style and organization of
the book are appropriate to novice academic readers, with aims and objectives
clearly stated, context established, and existing knowledge and beliefs elicited
through the series of task boxes, and then extended with information, exem-
plification, and critical discussion. An efficient glossary and task commentaries
add to the accessibility of the content.
This volume is reminiscent of Lightbown and Spada (2006) for its appeal
to practitioners who are training as novice researchers, and, like that volume,

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it is commendable for the clear and insightful course it steers between
language teaching pedagogy and second language acquisition theory. Hall’s
attention to the position of ELT, and ELT research, in an environment of
competing demands and priorities, gives his book a current relevance, and
recognizes the complexity of the challenges faced by teachers and learners in
the real world.

Reviewed by Tess Fitzpatrick

Centre for Language and Communication Research,
Cardiff University, UK
E-mail: fitzpatrickt@cardiff.ac.uk
doi:10.1093/applin/ams069 Advance Access published on 30 November 2012

REFERENCE
Lightbown, P.M. and N. Spada. 2006. How
Languages are Learned. Oxford: OUP.

Ken Hyland: DISCIPLINARY IDENTITIES: INDIVIDUALITY

AND COMMUNITY IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE.
Oxford University Press, 2012.

Ken Hyland’s Disciplinary Identities: Individuality and Community in Academic

Discourse provides a detailed account of how identities are constructed and
performed through the use of language in different academic disciplines
across a range of academic genres. Taking a corpus-based perspective,
Hyland shows the strength of employing this approach for bringing to light
the ways of doing things with language that are characteristic of different
disciplines and different writers within these disciplines. A particular strength
of this book is the way in which it theorizes disciplinary differences and the
wide range of insights it provides into how individuals draw on linguistic re-
sources to both achieve and maintain disciplinary membership. As Hyland
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(2002: 352) in an earlier publication points out ‘almost everything we write

says something about us and the sort of relationship that we want to set up
with our readers’. This book provides a very detailed account of how academic
writers do this.
In Chapter 1, Hyland outlines key theoretical issues that form the basis for
his work, notably identity, identification, and community and, specifically, how
identity is performed (Butler 1990) in academic discourse. Hyland, following
Butler and others, makes it clear that identities are socially constructed rather
than ‘natural’ and are formed through the ways in which we display who we
are, what we think, and what we value. These identities, further, ‘are not

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limitless but are constrained by the authority of historical repetition (p. 9).
That is, identities are both displayed and reaffirmed by repeatedly performing
particular acts (Cameron 2006) that are in accordance with the cultural norms
of the academy, its disciplines, and the power and authority of key players
within the disciplines. By way of example, Hyland gives the case of ‘self-men-
tion’ and how, through the avoidance of this, writers in some disciplines aim to
strengthen the objectivity of their research which, in turn, leads to a particular
credibility in the eyes of their readers and their discipline. Writers in other
areas might choose to use self-mention in order to project a different kind of
credibility, one that engages with their research in a rather different and more
personal way which leads to a different view of them as researchers within
their disciplinary community. Students are often told, Hyland (2002: 351) has
argued, ‘to leave their personalities at the door’ when they write and not to use
personal pronouns such as ‘I’ in their writing. The research he reports on in
this book shows that it is not as simple as this and that many expert academic
writers do exactly this in order to take on, perform, and identify with a par-
ticular scholarly identity.
Chapter 2 of the book takes the discussion of disciplinarity further by show-
ing how academic identities are constructed through proximity and positioning;
that is, through relationships between the individual writer and the particular
academic community, drawing on the social and discursive conventions of the
discipline (proximity), and the relationship between the writer and what they
have to say, including the point of view and stance they take towards what
they say (positioning). Chapter 3 outlines ways in which identity has been
investigated in areas such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis,
narrative analysis, and corpus analysis. This, and the previous chapters, then,
prepare the ground for the chapters which follow where identity is explored in
a range of different genres and where repeated patterns of language reveal
shared rhetorical conventions as well as how writers both display and
‘index’ (Bucholtz and Hall 2003) particular group memberships.
Chapter 4 presents analyses of what Hyland terms ‘representational’ genres,
texts which ‘involve the direct assertion of identity claims and have the
self-conscious expression of self as the primary purpose’ (p. 71). The genres
he examines here are thesis acknowledgements, doctoral students’ prize ap-
plications, and academic homepages. In the case of thesis acknowledgements,
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Hyland shows not only the typical ways in which these texts are organized but
also how student writers use their texts to display their disciplinary member-
ship and networks at the same time as they express gratitude to the people that
have helped them in their academic undertaking. In his discussion of prize
applications, Hyland shows how doctoral students highlight their expertise in
various areas of research in order to display their claims to have a competent
academic identity. As they do this, they aim to persuade the panel of judges
that they are credible academics by drawing on specific rhetorical resources as
well as by displaying alignment with particular values. In the discussion of
academic homepages, Hyland shows how writers do not ‘write’ these texts

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as much as they ‘assemble’ the culturally valued attributes of their commu-
nity. Through these texts, writers ‘convey an impression of how they would
like to be seen by others’ (p. 86); that is, the particular academic identity they
would like their readers to ascribe to them as they read their text.
Chapter 5 examines self-representation in academic bios and the specific
rhetorical choices that writers make as they construct these texts. Hyland
shows how personal features of writers’ lives such as their family, religion,
and leisure-time activities are downplayed or omitted in the texts, while schol-
arly attributes, experiences, and values are highlighted. His analysis, further,
reveals the importance of the disciplines in how these texts are constructed.
For example, the electrical engineering bios he examined gave more weight to
education while the philosophy bios emphasized research interests and publi-
cations, showing strong connections between the individual writer and the
collective.
Chapter 6 examines authority and visibility in academic writing and, in
particular, the writing that Hong Kong students do in their undergraduate
studies. Hyland discusses self-mention in the students’ writing and disciplinary
preferences for this. In Chapter 7, Hyland examines individuality and conform-
ity in academic writing and the ways in which recurrent patterns of language
work to construct particular identities. He does this by examining the written
work of two key writers, John Swales and Deborah Cameron. What he shows
is how Swales and Cameron’s authorial identity is accomplished through sets
of repeated acts (Butler 1993) on repeated rhetorical occasions, and how this is
achieved through the use of discourse.
Chapter 8 takes up the issue of gender and disciplinary identity by examin-
ing book reviews in the areas of biology and philosophy. In line with current
views of language and gender, Hyland finds no one-to-one relationship be-
tween language and gender, showing that the writing of men and women in
this genre shows more similarities than it does differences. Chapter 9 draws the
book to a close by reviewing the findings of the book in relation to identity,
disciplinarity, and methodologies for exploring them.
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In sum, Hyland’s book shows how academic writers represent themselves in

ways that are valued by their discipline as they adopt the values, beliefs, and
identity of a successful academic writer in their area of study. He shows how
writers negotiate a self which is coherent and meaningful to both themselves
and their group. Importantly, Hyland points out how these identities are only
successful by the extent to which they are recognized by the discipline and the
group. Identity, thus, is a negotiated experience in which we ‘define who we
are by the way we experience ourselves ... as well as by the ways we and others
reify ourselves’ (Wenger 1998: 149).
As we all know, establishing a successful academic identity is something that

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is often difficult for beginning academic writers. For second language writers,
this is further complicated by students bringing a different writer ‘voice’ from
their first language setting to the second language writing situation (Fox 1994).
Hirvela and Belcher (2001) have argued that we need to know more about the
ways students present themselves in their first language writing and about
their first language and culture identities, so we can help them deal with the
issue of identity in their second-language writing. And, of course, we need to
know more about how successful academic writers in different academic dis-
ciplines construct and present scholarly identities through the texts that they
write. Hyland’s book, through his thorough and fine-grained analysis of a
range of academic genres in different disciplinary settings, moves us well for-
ward in our understanding of this.

Reviewed by Brian Paltridge

University of Sydney, Australia
E-mail: brian.paltridge@sydney.edu.au
doi:10.1093/applin/ams070 Advance Access published on 7 December 2012

REFERENCES
Bucholtz, M. and K. Hall. 2003. ‘Language and
identity’ in A. Duranti (ed.): A Companion to
Linguistic Anthropology. Blackwell, pp. 369–94.
Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity. Routledge.
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Routledge.
Cameron, D. 2006. ‘Performing gender identity:
young men’s talk and the construction of het-
erosexual masculinity’ in A. Jaworski and
N. Coupland (eds): The Discourse Reader, 2nd
edn. Routledge, pp. 419–32.
Fox, H. 1994. Listening to the World: Cultural Issues
in Academic Writing. National Council of
Teachers of English.
Hirvela, A. and D. Belcher. 2001. ‘Coming back
to voice: The multiple voices and identities of
mature multilingual writers,’ Journal of Second
Language Writing 10/1–2: 83–106.
Hyland, K. 2002. ‘Options of identity in aca-
demic writing,’ ELT Journal 56/4: 351–8.
Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of Practice:
Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge
University Press.