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The importance of academic writing in Higher Education is emanating and clearly have posed challenges for students. However, variations in academic writing has become a norm and no longer be considered as violations of standards in academic writing. This study investigates how students may also reveal their personalities, attitudes, and assumptions in their essays as important milestone in their language learning process. Data for this study are 100 essays from 5 countries (Indonesia, China, Japan, Singapore, and Thailand) taken from ICNALE (The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) database. By applying model for Metadiscourse by Hyland (2005) it can be seen that there are similarities and differences in how students reveal their identities in writing. In the use of pronoun we Indonesian learners are higher in frequency (15 times) than Japanese learners (5 times per 1,000 words) who use pronoun I more (50) than their Indonesian counterparts (15). These findings confirm the occurrence of the influence of mother tongue in the process of writing. It is concluded that such phenomenon needs to be embraced by teachers and learners alike and awareness of different realisations in academic writing will empower learners in their academic and future professional endeavours. Implications for teaching and material development in composition pedagogy are also discussed.