4.1.2 Data sets and their description
The use of naturally occurring data for the study of identity construction and advising acts in institutional settings has become more common in recent years (e.g. DeCapua & Dunham, 1993; Harrison & Barlow, 2009; Heritage &Sefi, 1992; Holmes et al.,1999; Kouper, 2010; Leppänen, 1998; Limberg, 2010;Richards, 2006; Sarangi & Roberts, 1999; Vehviläinen, 2009). Rue and Zhang(2008, p. 35) point out, “the data elicited from the recording of actual talk-in-interactions is the most authentic data.” This type of data can provide a better understanding of how identity is linguistically constructed in academic interaction.
The data for the present study were collected with a digital recorder in their natural environment from two universities in China. The data consist of five PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings. Each meeting lasted over one hour. The details of each data set are presented in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 Details of data sets
Note: PhD DPPM = PhD dissertation proposal presentation meetings in a Chinese context.Four members’ speeches in data sets 1, 2 and 4 were transcribed.
After these meetings were recorded, they were partially transcribed in terms of the Transcription Notations used by Limberg (2010, p. XII-XIII), which were slightly modified to meet the objectives of the present study (see“Abbreviations and Transcription Notations”). In addition, the examples used in this study were translated from Chinese into English by following two criteria: first, English translation focuses on the meaning conveyed, so some fillers or paralinguistic information in Chinese version will be omitted in English translation; second, some sentences in English version will be enriched with supplementary information in brackets according to their contexts, to make the English translation coherent. Numbers were used to indicate the utterances or paralinguistic information (e.g. laughter) sequentially produced by participants. The word “line” followed by a number (e.g. line 1) was used to refer to the place of the utterances or paralinguistic information corresponding to the number when I analyzed the specific examples no matter whether the utterances were presented in one row or several rows.