Power Relations and Identity Construction in Didactic Discourse: a Polish-English Comparative Study

This paper reports on the findings of these aspects of my own semi-ethnographic study which relate to the reader-oriented view of didactic discourse and emphasize the constitutive impact of social context (and the relations of power inscribed in it) on the formation of the writer’s self. Following Halliday’s (1978, 1994) approach to “language as a form of social practice” I will argue that power relations are a central force which mediates didactic discourse and profoundly affects the way student writers construct their authorial self.