Modeling Novice Academic Discourse Across Disciplines: A Five-Dimensional Linguistic Framework for Tracing Disciplinary Voice in Law and Education

This study examines how novice L2 writers construct disciplinary voice across epistemologically divergent domains—Law and English Education—using the Five-Dimensional Disciplinary Discourse Model (5D-DDM). Drawing on two purpose-built corpora (75 texts each), a corpus-assisted analysis traced rhetorical variation across five dimensions. In Education, students exhibited (1) a relational stance through collective self-mention and cautious modality; (2) agentive positioning with participatory reader engagement; (3) hybrid patterning via SVO syntax, classificatory noun phrases, and evaluative collocations; (4) restrained affect with moderate appreciation and minimal judgment; and (5) expansive interdiscursivity through media-cultural recontextualization. Conversely, Law texts displayed (1) a categorical stance marked by suppressed self-mention and booster-driven certainty; (2) depersonalized authorship with monologic reader positioning; (3) fixed legal collocations, procedural passives, and normative modality; (4) codified judgment with affective suppression and limited appreciation; and (5) compressed interdiscursivity anchored in statutory authority. These contrastive rhetorical profiles reflect differentiated disciplinary enculturation rather than linguistic deficit. Pedagogically, the findings support dimension-specific instruction: dialogic modulation, evidential control, and attributional framing in Education; procedural calibration, genre-based recontextualization, and institutionally bounded authorial agency in Law. The 5D-DDM offers a replicable framework for analyzing how novice writers negotiate disciplinary identity, epistemic alignment, and rhetorical authority across institutional discourse traditions.