A triadic discourse-identity-affordance framework for scaffolding the development of research discourse competence

Academic writing instruction in EFL contexts has increasingly emphasized genre awareness and rhetorical competence. However, less attention has been paid to how discourse strategies, academic identity, and sociocultural context interact in students' writing development, or how such interaction can be pedagogically operationalized. The present study proposes and implements a multidimensional academic discourse–identity framework that conceptualizes academic writing as the coordinated enactment of discourse strategies (Ethos, Pathos, and Logos), academic identity roles, and sociocultural affordances. The framework was implemented in an English academic writing course for undergraduate engineering students, where instruction guided students to make explicit rhetorical decisions in relation to disciplinary expectations and projected professional identities. To examine how the framework functioned in practice, the study adopts a qualitative research design combining micro-level textual analysis of students’ writing with post-course interviews. Pre- and post-intervention Introduction sections from three students representing different proficiency levels were selected as focal cases. The findings show consistent improvements in rhetorical organization, credibility construction, and authorial positioning. Notably, these developments were observed across proficiency levels, suggesting that discourse awareness and identity enactment can develop alongside, or even prior to, full linguistic accuracy. The study contributes to EAP research by offering a theoretically grounded yet pedagogically actionable framework, and by providing fine-grained discourse evidence of how academic writing competence develops through the interaction of discourse, identity, and context.