Towards iterative authorship: CALD students’ reimagined writing identities through GenAI-assisted writing

With Generative AI’s (GenAI) widespread use and reliance, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students face key challenges in terms of cross-cultural thinking and linguistic expression as academic writers. There is a gap in research that provides critical frameworks to examine ways that GENAI enables and constrains writing practices and that identifies CALD students’ ambivalence about GenAI use. This article profiles ten international students’ reflections about GenAI-enabled academic writing that offers key insights about critical ways to navigate GenAI-assisted academic writing. Applying Ivanič’s research on writer identityand Mollick’sconcept of “iterative instinct”, we examine how CALD students at a UK university perceive themselves, their culture and their identity within the context of GenAI-assisted writing practices. The research is ethnographic in nature, combining focus group data with a week of AI interactional data from each participant. Findings reveal the gains and losses at stake for CALD as they grapple with developing an academic writing identity in the age of GenAI. In particular, the study shows that writers’ intuition and GenAI-supported iteration become mutually constitutive, giving rise to hybrid forms of academic authorship and extending existing understandings of writer identity in the GenAI era.