Self-mentions And Construction Of Graduate Students’ Identity Roles In Simulated International Conferences

Academic writing has always been the research focus by the scholars,and much attention has been drawn to the authorial presence construction in writing,which is usually characteristic of the use of first person pronouns.These pronouns are believed to be the most powerful rhetorical strategy to project one’s authorial identity in academic writing.Many a research was conducted on the writings by professional academic writers and novice researchers and on comparison made between L1 and L2 writers.Nevertheless,less literature has reviewed the identity construction in oral academic genres than written discourse,especially for Chinese presenters as non-native English learners.These include the novice researchers and graduate students who lack the awareness and capacity to deliver effective and communicative presentations in an international community.Besides,academic presentations are virtually more tolerant of self-mentions,making it appropriate and necessary to investigate the identity construction in terms of use of first person pronouns under the oral academic presentation context.Previous research on oral academic presentations concentrated on identity construction by graduate students or professionals learning English as their first language or on researchers from the international community.However,rare study revolves around novice graduate researchers in China who learn English for academic purposes in the presentations including delivering their research papers at the international conference.Therefore,this paper focuses on the investigation of self-mention pronouns in use by Chinese graduate students in Simulated International Conference(SIC)with Southeast University(SEU)as a case study.The research intends to identify how Chinese graduate students project themselves as scholars and construct their identities through self-mention pronouns and the difference with those native graduate students as novice researchers.The data analysis is based on oral corpus collected from the Simulated International Conference final contests from 2017 to 2019.The corpus contains 24 best-performed academic presentations at SICs,a crucial Academic Communication English reform implemented at Southeast University with an aim to enhance graduate English communicative capacity in their future real life-like international conference.The oral corpus is transcribed manually and concorded in software Ant Con3.5.8 with the focus on the identity roles encoded in their use of first person pronouns I,my,me;we,our and us.The taxonomy of identity roles is classified into four categories: written genre roles,societal roles,speech event roles and engagement roles,with the first three in reference to Zareva(2013)and the last one in reference to Webber(2005)and Yeo and Ting(2014),all of which are characteristic of students’ presentations as a genre.With the qualitative and quantitative analysis of self-mentions and their discourse functions categorized in the transcribed corpus and in accordance to the questionnaire outcomes,the results can be summarized as follows:Firstly,graduate students exhibit the greatest preference to establish themselves as professionals by aligning to academic written genres(86%),followed by social identity roles with10%,and speech event roles with 4%,in terms of the use of first person singular pronouns.The result verifies the subtle interplay between writing genres and oral genres,indicating the effects of written practices on presenters,in accordance to the questionnaire outcome of more than 99%students preparing the written scripts in advance.Secondly,engagement role constitutes the distinctive feature of Chinese graduate academic presentations.Sufficient instances of first person plural pronouns characteristic of exclusive “we”(30.2%)are identified where other references otherwise are more explicit in reference,indicating the cultural impact on their choice of language.Besides,numerous instances of inclusive “we”(51.2%)referring to presenters plus the audience and exclusive “we”(30.2%)suggest that Chinese graduate students are aware of the audience’ presence and strive to engage the audience into the speech process based on the questionnaire,taking into account the interactive nature of oral genres.Lastly,in term of the discourse functions of self-mention pronouns,the most frequent roles the presenter inhabits in the speeches are “presenter as a guide”(55%)and “presenter as an architect”(20%)and the engagement role(81.4%).However,the dominant roles express less powerful authorial presence compared with the roles as an opinion and originator(5%respectively).Moreover,their linguistic choice to project different identity roles are always repetitive.Compared with the results by Zareva(2013),fewer instances with characteristic of social identity roles are identified in SEU graduate corpus,occupying 10% in contrast to Zareva’s34%,a reflection of lack of awareness of one’s social roles during the presentations.In consequence,the results evidently suggest that there are deficiencies for Chinese graduate students to encode some identity roles(e.g.social and written genre identity roles)in their presentations with first person pronouns usage,including lack of awareness to position oneself through first person pronouns,to consider one’s identity roles and repetitive linguistic choice for identity construction.Therefore,some pedagogical implications are expected for explicit teaching of strategic use of the first person pronouns to enhance graduate student awareness.