Rhetorical negotiation and mediation in successful academic writing: The experiences of an international postgraduate student in Australia

This paper reports on one part of a research project that investigates how international postgraduate students negotiate rhetorical conventions in their studies and progress to being successful academic writers in the Australian academic context. Academic writing has increasingly been employed to assess
writers’ disciplinary knowledge and discursive competence to enter a discourse community. Unfortunately, an ongoing concern is how emerging professionals are able to acquire and align with the writing conventions required in their respective communities to have their membership legitimised. For international student writers, producing successful academic writing is unquestionably a rhetorical challenge when facing different rhetorical requirements under multiple
sociocultural-political influences in their new academic contexts. This may lead to a lack of acceptance in their academic community. The case study reported here, explores how an international student in Australia developed her understanding and enactment of rhetorical negotiation to produce successful
academic writing and acceptable authorial voice. The international student involved was enrolled in a Master of Education program at one Australian university. Drawing on Intercultural Rhetoric (Connor, 2008), the writing conventions in the academic context that the student had to align with were firstly explored. Subsequently, two written assignments of the student were analysed using the Self-Positioning model (Ivanič & Camps, 2001) to identify the student’s responses to the rhetorical expectations of the assignments and expressions of authorial voice. The lecturer’s feedback on the assignments was also collected for analysis. Text analysis was subsequently assisted by “talk around texts" interviews (Lillis, 2008) with both the student and the lecturer to gain their insights into the act of rhetorical negotiation and the demonstration of authorial voice. The findings revealed the student’s understanding of and lecturer’s expectation of authorial voice in academic writing, and the cruciality
of rhetorical negotiation for successful writing, which might not be recognisable to the student but could be achieved with proper mediation from the lecturer and peers. The study clarified the act of rhetorical negotiation and mediation for successful writing, which has been loosely discussed in both Intercultural Rhetoric and current literature, for pedagogical implications to support international postgraduate students in Australia.