| As international academic exchange expands,English academic writing has become increasingly important,drawing more and more scholars to do research on it from different perspectives.Among them,writer identity has recently become one of the hot topics.With a consensus almost reached on seeing identity as constructed through discourse,dynamic and multifaceted,and constrained by contextual factors,the issue of how writers construct various kinds of identities for various purposes through discourse in English academic writings and whether this process is influenced by their level of academic pragmatic competence calls for careful exploration.So far,although discussions on Chinese EFL learners' writer identity in English academic writings have gradually increased,a large number of studies are carried out relating to identification,whereas studies on identity construction are relatively deficient and most of them focus on the use of first person pronouns.A few studies have paid attention to the role metadiscourse can play in constructing writer identity in English academic writings,but the question as to what specific types of identities can be constructed through the use of metadicourse remains untouched.Therefore,systemic research on the connections between metadisourse and identity construction is still lacking.Accordingly,the present study attempts to explore the features of Chinese postgraduates' use of metadiscourse and identity construction in their graduation thesis writing.Based on the view of identity construction from the perspective of pragmatics(Chen Xinren,2013 a,2013 d,2014b),it is hypothesized that the writer,driven by certain communicative purposes in English academic writings,constructs various identities through the use of metadiscourse under the influence of some contextual factors.Moreover,it is hypothesized that the performance of Chinese postgraduates'construction of identities through the use of metadiscourse in English academic writings represents their academic pragmatic competence to some extent.In order to test the above hypotheses,the present study starts from the exploration of communicative purposes of using metadiscourse in English academic writings and then investigates the types of identities constructed by Chinese postgraduates through the use of metadiscourse and their performance in the construction of those identities in comparison to international scholars.Besides,the present study discusses the types of metadiscourse used by Chinese postgraduates to construct those identities and their performance in the use of metadiscourse compared with international scholars.Finally,the present study probes into the developmental features of Chinese postgraduates from the master's stage to the doctoral stage in terms of both construction of identities and the use of metadiscourse in English academic writings.The study aims to reveal the relationship between Chinese postgraduates' construction of identities through the use of metadiscourse and their academic pragmatic competence.The present study chooses 20 graduation theses written by Chinese masters and 10 graduation theses written by Chinese doctorates as the research data as well as 30 research articles published in international journals as the reference data.In addition,four master 's degree theses and four PhD theses written by four Chinese postgraduates respectively are selected as the case study's data.Focusing on the four sections of all the articles including Introduction,Literature Review,Discussion and Conclusion,the present study adopts case study and interview in addition to comparison and contrast to examine Chinese postgraduates'performance and changing trend from the master's stage to the doctoral stage in the construction of identities and the use of metadiscourse in terms of types,frequencies and distributions among the four sections.The research findings are summarized as follows.Firstly,Chinese postgraduates construct three major types and six subtypes of identities through the use of metadisourse in English academic writings.The three major types of identities are evaluator,interactor and organizer.Among them,the identity of evaluator involves both other-evaluator and self-evaluator;the identity of interactor is classified into self-initiated and other-initiated identity;and the identity of organizer includes connector and interpreter.The evaluation is expressed towards either others' or the writer's research,the interaction with the reader is initiated by mentioning either the reader or the writer,and the organization of discourse includes both connection between clauses and interpretation of propositions.The result shows that driven by three kinds of communicative purposes,namely evaluating,interacting and organizing,Chinese postgraduates choose to use metadiscourse to construct certain identities,which shows no differences with the international scholars.Chinese postgraduates differ from the international scholars in terms of the frequencies and distributional features of the above identities.Deficiencies can be found in their satisfying the three kinds of communicative needs,which is mainly represented by their insufficient competence of evaluating and interacting.Secondly,with regard to the types of metadiscourse used to construct the above identities,Chinese postgraduates also show similar patterns with the international scholars.Specifically,the identity of evaluator is constructed through the use of attitude markers,including affect markers,judgement markers and appreciation markers.The identity of interactor is constructed through the use of self-mentions and engagement markers,with the former used to construct the identity of self-initiated interactor and the latter other-initiated interactor.The identity of organizer is constructed through the use of transitions,frame markers,endophoric markers and code glosses.Among them,the first three kinds of metadiscourse are used to construct the identity of connector,with only code glosses used to construct the identity of interpreter.Different from the international scholars,Chinese postgraduates display lack of variety and imbalanced use of metadiscourse to construct various identities in the four major sections of their theses.Thirdly,through the case study of four Chinese postgraduates' master's theses and doctoral theses,we found that Chinese postgraduates' academic pragmatic competence becomes closer to the international scholars at the doctoral stage than at the master's stage,which is particularly represented in their improvement of evaluating and organizing competence.Specifically,they construct more identities through the use of metadiscourse in the Introduction part till the doctoral stage;the frequencies of evaluator and self-evaluator in the Discussion part and those of interpreter in the Introduction and Discussion parts increase from the master's stage to the doctoral stage.However,their performance in the construction of interactor identity displays that their competence of interacting is still insufficient up until the doctoral stage.Moreover,Chinese postgraduates use more affect markers and code glosses till the doctoral stage;the frequency of frame markers in the Introduction part decreases;and the frequencies of code glosses in the Introduction and Discussion parts increase.These show that Chinese postgraduates'employment of metadiscourse becomes richer and more balanced in their these from the master's stage to the doctoral stage.The present study reveals the relationship between the use of metadiscourse and the construction of identities in English academic writings in addition to that between construction of identities through the use of metadiscourse and academic pragmatic competence.On the one hand,it provides a new theoretical perspective into the research of metadiscourse in English academic writings and enriches the application of pragmatic identity theory.On the other,the research provides enlightenment for improving Chinese postgraduates'academic pragmatic competence so as to guide both learning and teaching of their English academic writings. |
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