A Study Of The Relationship Of English Academic Postgraduates’ Self-identity With Their Thesis Writing Competence

Language learning can not only help to enrich learners’ basic linguistic knowledge and skills, but also takes an important part in the construction of their self-identity. The construction of self-identity is closely related to language learning and personal development. Positive self-identity will help the learners build up self-confidence and negative self-identity will lead to identity confusion. To some extent, when people learn a new language, his/her self-identity may change. Therefore, this topic has attracted more and more scholars’ concern abroad and home. In the last few decades, thus, researches on learners’ self-identity changes have been increased and have achieved great achievements, mainly choosing subjects from the immigrants, high school students, English and even non-English major undergraduates and postgraduates in some key universities. Whether “productive bilingualism” exists in English academic postgraduates in ordinary universities after giving them academic English training needs more empirical evidence.Besides, the main task of postgraduate education is not only to improve the postgraduates’ academic learning ability and to promote their self-identity, but also to cultivate their thesis writing competence. Therefore, English academic postgraduates’ self-identity and thesis writing competence are two indispensable components in postgraduates’ personal development.However, there is no research on the relationship between them.The present study, adopting a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, choosing40 English academic postgraduates as research subjects from an ordinary university in Shandong province, tried to explore the correlation between English academic postgraduates’ self-identity and their thesis writing competence. The statistical data collected from the questionnaire, were processed with the help of software SPSS 17.0, and that obtained from a semi-structured interview were processed by the method of qualitative analysis, aiming to answer the following three questions:(1) What is the status quo of English academic postgraduates’ self-identity after their receiving academic training?(2) What is the general situation of postgraduates’ thesis writing competence? And(3) How is academic postgraduates’ self-identity related to their thesis writing competence?The results of the present study are as follows:(1) English academic postgraduates of ordinary universities, after receiving academic English training, have basically formed positive and stable self-identity. Five types of their self-identity were exhibited: self-confidence, as the most important one, is greatly affected by academic training; productive identity and additive identity are obvious among them; but subtractive identity and split identity do not become a trend in postgraduates’ self-identity. What’s more, individual differences of self-identity werefound among different groups. The group majoring in Applied Linguistics present better self-confidence and additive identity than the group majoring in English Literature, and the group coming from cities own higher self-confidence than those from rural areas.(2) The general situation of postgraduates’ thesis proficiency of English academic postgraduates is at the good level. And there is a big difference between high level group and low level group not only in the total scores of their whole theses but in the score of each aspect of the thesis including research topic, literature review, research methodology, results and discussion, and discussion. Besides,there are 5 components comprising postgraduates’ thesis writing competence, including critical thinking ability, innovation ability, literature review ability, application ability and language competence. These five components are closely related to each other, interact with each other and work together, to promote the postgraduates’ thesis writing competence.(3) There is a close relationship between postgraduates’ self-identity and thesis writing competence. That is, positive self-identity has significant positive effects on improvement of thesis writing competence, and vice versa. The results of the study have significant implications for both learners and teachers in thesis writing. First of all, the writers of academic thesis should learn to improve their self-identity and fully promote their own thesis writing competence. Secondly, teachers of thesis writing can help learners acquire positive self-identity through cultivation of their thesis writing competence.There are, needless to say, some shortcomings in the study, such as, a smaller size of the sample and a population imbalance between males and females. The present study, nevertheless,has achieved its expected goals, enriched theoretical achievements of related studies on self-identity and has provide some valuable reference for future academic thesis writing teaching.