L2 Creative Writers' Identities: Their Cognitive Writing Processes and Sense of Empowerment

This study examines the personal identities and cognitive writing processes of two adult second language (L2) creative writers. Adopting a sociocultural stance, it identifies the L2 writers as social agents whose creative expression, self-perceptions and language are intrinsically bound together. Through interviews and think-aloud story writing sessions, the study investigates the L2 writers' identities through analysing the individuals' self-recounts of creative writing experience and their cognitive writing processes when engaging in particular story writing tasks. The two writers are found to demonstrate distinctive ‘personalities’ throughout their cognitive writing process, which are associated with their previous cultural linguistic experiences. The study argues that the practice of L2 creative writing can be performed by L2 users not only for purposes of language or literacy acquisition, but also as a self-empowering tool to achieve particular social positioning and hence self-esteem. The insights hold pedagogical values for language and writing classroom.