Abstract
Strengthening students’ ability to project their authorial voice in academic writing can help them better manage authorship issues such as plagiarism through improving authenticity, agency, and ownership of texts. However, new university students who are non-native speakers of English (NNSE) often face challenges with their authorial voice that leads to issues with confidence and plagiarism. The chapter presents the findings for the user test of AVATAR (Authorial Voice Toolkit for Authorship Reflection), a new intelligent tutoring system that can be used to develop students’ authorship beliefs in their argumentative essays by providing affordances for reflection and practice with authorial voice. When essays are uploaded to AVATAR, it prompts students to reflect on their authorial voice using a self-scoring voice rubric comprising dimensions such as presence and clarity of ideas, manner of idea presentation, and writer and reader presence. AVATAR then presents students the results of their self-scoring and a visualization of the authorial voice language already present in their essay. Since each authorial voice dimension is associated with a particular set of authorial voice language, students can edit their essays to strengthen the dimension they did not feel confident about. A user experience study was conducted with 23 NNSE first-year university students who were attending an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course at a public university in Fiji. Findings showed statistically significant changes in participants’ authorship belief survey results and their self-scores for authorial voice strength. Post-use interviews confirmed changes in authorial confidence and self-identification as authors. These positive changes in authorship beliefs can promote authenticity in academic writing. The implications of these findings underscore the importance of developing student-facing learning technologies that provide reflexive affordances alongside opportunities to practice writing skills.