Second Language Learners' Identity Development In Academic Writing

With the internationalization of China's higher education,the quantity of foreign students for academic degree increased quickly.However their academic Chinese proficiency and identity development in the tasks of attending class,presentation,academic reading and academic writing havn't attracted much attention in the field of Chinese as a Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Research.This dissertation explores three foreign students' identity development in the process of Chinese writing for academic purposes during their years of study for master's degree in a university in mainland China.We use the theory of Second Language Socialization from the social-cultural perspective to research on this topic.From the view of the theory,learning another language and getting a membership in the target discourse community are the two sides in one coin.That is to say,research on the development of learners' identity is as important as the research on the development of second language proficiency in the field of second language acquisition.At present,researches on learners' identity have started in the field of English as a second language writing for academic purposes.However,most researches focus on the relationship between English learners' identity which is the static label of social groups,and the characteristics of learners' written language with the method of text analysis.On the contrary,our research focuses on the development of Chinese learners' identity which is considered as a dynamic process of becoming members into discourse communities through academic writing with the longitudinal qualitative case study of narrative and text analysis.Our research findings suggest that:(1)In the process of identity development,second language learners' identity develops in an unbalanced and nonlinear way.During the development,second language learners' identity is always affected by their previous language learning/using experiences,as well as the unequal social relationships between second language learners and the native speakers,and the results of their language socialization are always with the second language learners'characteristics even if they have become the legal members in the target discourse community,so that the process of second language socialization is more complicated than the native speakers' language socialization.(2)Factors such as contexts,activities and communicators in language communicative events play a key role in second language learners' identity development through various and comprehensive"interactive negotiations" between learners and native speakers,which push learners from affiliation to independence in the new language discourse communities.(3)Affected by the identity development,second language learners' strategies and language performance in language communicative events change in different phrases which show that proficiency of language perfoamance is the combination of personal and social characteristics.After this tentative research on Chinese learners' identity development,we suggest that more researches on Chinese learners' identity should be carried on with different methods,especially qualitative methods,so as to offer more suggestions for academic Chinese classes for foreign students in Chinese universities.