1.3 Structure of the Book
This book consists of eight chapters. Chapter Two briefly reviews previous definitions of identity, classifications of identity and the pragmatic approach to identity and its construction. At the same time, a discussion is conducted to define identity and its construction in the present study. This is followed by a brief look at previous studies on identity construction in both spoken and written academic discourse. Previous studies on advising are also carefully reviewed by discussing two approaches to advising: advising as a speech act and advising as a problem-solving activity, and by presenting studies on identity construction in advising. Finally, some of the research gaps left by the previous studies are presented as the summary of this chapter.
Chapter Three first presents a sketch of the theoretical background,including the Community of Practice, the relationship between identities and speech acts, and the Linguistic Adaptation Theory. Within the theoretical framework of the Linguistic Adaptation Theory, a working analytical framework is established for conducting this study, including four dimensions:identity construction as a means of satisfying communicative needs, identity construction as a process of making choices, identity construction as a dynamic process and identity construction as an adaption to contextual correlates.
Chapter Four is about the methodology adopted in this study. First, data collection is carefully described, including the data source, the description of data sets and the transcription notations and the criteria for translating the examples from Chinese into English. This is followed by an explanation of how data are analyzed, including the identification and extraction of advising acts,the method for analyzing identity construction and the linguistic variables for constructing identity, the theoretical basis of and criteria for classifying identities in institutional interactions, and the contextual correlates involved in academic advising interaction.
Chapter Five examines different identities constructed by advice-givers in their advising sequences and linguistic choices made for identity construction. The focus is on the sub-categories of the default identity and various deviational identities and the linguistic choices made to construct different identities, which can be summarized as linguistic forms, discourse contents and discourse styles. The discussion also concerns the distribution of various identities in different sequences of an advising interaction.
Chapter Six provides a detailed look at the dynamics of identity construction in academic advising interaction. Two types of the dynamic construction of identities are carefully investigated, namely making identity modification and making identity shift. Some basic patterns of identity shift are worked out.
Chapter Seven attempts to provide an adequate interpretation for the dynamic identity construction in academic advising interaction, which has been described in Chapters Five and Six. To achieve this goal, the chapter first probes into how identity construction can be used as a means of satisfying communicative needs in the current context of academic advising interaction.This is followed by an examination of how identity construction adapts to various contextual correlates in the social world, the mental world and the physical world.
Chapter Eight summarizes the major findings of the study, discusses the implications, points out the limitations and provides some suggestions for further research in terms of corpus size, a multimodal approach and a comparative method.
【注释】
[1]See “Abbreviations and Transcription Notations.”
[2]In the present study, Chinese PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings can be considered as a sub-genre of spoken academic interaction. This genre can include many activities and advice-giving is one of the activities. The focus of this study is on the advice-giving activity instead of this sub-genre of spoken academic interaction.