3.1.1　Community of Practice

The Community of Practice (CofP) was originally proposed as a social theory of learning, and “only recently found its application in sociolinguistics”(Duszak, 2002, p. 4). So far it has been widely used to discuss learning and identity in the field of sociolinguistics. According to Eckert (1992, p. 8), a community of practice is “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in some common endeavor.” In a community of practice,the members’ ways of doing things, talking, beliefs, values and power relations “emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavor”(ibid.). In addition, communities of practice can differ in size. For example, a community of practice can be the people working together in a large factory,the students and teacher in a classroom, or even a nuclear family.

Wenger (1998, p. 73) points out that the following three dimensions are crucial to identify a CofP: (1) mutual engagement; (2) a joint negotiated enterprise; (3) a shared repertoire. The PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings form a community of practice because it well satisfies the basic characteristics of a community of a practice, particularly the three crucial dimensions of a CofP.

In communities of practice, social meaning, social identity, community membership and forms of participation in practice are “being constantly and mutually constructed” (Eckert,1992, p. 9). Moreover, individuals can participate in multiple communities of practice and individual identities are based in the multiplicity of the participation. A community of practice also operates with some norms and expectations (Bucholtz, 1999; Graham, 2007;Holmes & Meyerhoff, 1999; Weaver, 2006). Graham (2007) explores a computer-mediated community and finds that deviation from the communicative norms of this community of practice often results in conflict.This indicates that members of a community of practice should follow its norms and expectations when they undertake their practices. For the purpose of the present study, these norms and expectations concern certain identities expected to be constructed and power expected to be displayed in an institutional community of practice. For example, in Chinese PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings, the members of the committee are expected to construct an expert identity and their higher power is expected to be displayed by performing certain speech acts, for example, asking questions,giving advice, making comments, etc.

It should be noted that the academic advising interaction to be analyzed in the present study is one of the main activities in PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings, which form a community of practice. The role of the notion of community of practice played in the general theoretical framework of the present study is to provide a basis for a general classification of the identities constructed by advice-givers in their advising sequences. This notion will therefore be used explicitly in discussion of the classification of identities and in other cases this notion will be kept implicit, because what is described and interpreted (e.g., in Chapters Six and Seven) concerns one of the activities in the community of practice of PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings.