2.4　Summary

This chapter has given a brief review of previous studies on identity and its construction, identity construction in both spoken and written academic interaction, and two approaches to advising and identity construction in advising. Although previous studies have contributed much to the exploration of various issues relating to these three general topics, there are still some gaps left to be filled by further research. These can be summarized as follows:

Firstly, although categories of identity have been a focus of previous studies, investigation into the deviational identities in institutional interactions has not received enough attention. Moreover, there has been lacking of a theoretical distinction between default and deviational identities in institutional interactions.

Secondly, although discourse-analytic method has been widely used to examine identity construction, only a few studies have discussed what contents can be included in such a method to make it more workable. A specific framework is therefore needed to provide a detailed description of identity construction.

Thirdly, although previous studies have contributed substantially to the dynamic construction of identity, they have mainly focused on how one identity is constructed by exploiting various linguistic resources when an interaction unfolds and how identity changes from one to another in terms of the change of situations. The dynamic construction of identity in one verbal activity type (e.g., advice-giving) has as yet attracted little attention.

Finally, although some previous studies have probed into motivations of identity construction, few of them have looked into those of identity construction in spoken academic interaction. The motivations of identity construction and their functioning mechanisms might be, to some extent,different from one genre to another as well as from one verbal activity type to another. A particular examination is therefore needed to work out the motivations of identity construction and their functioning mechanisms in spoken academic interaction

This study attempts to fill in these research gaps by probing into the advice-givers’ dynamic construction of identities in their advising sequences in Chinese PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings. First, this study will examine both default and deviational identities constructed by advice-givers through making linguistic choices in academic advising interaction. The linguistic variables for constructing identities will subsequently be worked out as the main contents of the discourse-analytic method adopted in the present study and will be used to analyze identity construction in academic advising interaction. In addition, the dynamics of identity construction in the interaction in question will be carefully described, particularly identity modification and identity shift. Finally, contextual correlates and communicative needs in identity construction will be discussed in detail to provide an interpretation of identity construction in academic advising interaction. All of this will be done within a single theoretical framework,namely the Linguistic Adaptation Theory (Verschueren, 1999).

【注释】

[1]Although some scholars, for example, Austin, have said little about identity, their discussion on speech acts clearly shows that the interlocutors’ identities do play a role in verbal communication.

[2]The academic advising in the present study is different from the “academic advising”in Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford’s (1990, 1993, 1996). In their studies, “the purpose of the advising sessions is for the students and their advisors to determine the students’ academic schedules for the coming semester. Each semester students meet with their advisors to select an appropriate schedule” (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1996, p. 172).