7.3　Summary

This chapter has investigated the communicative needs to be satisfied in academic advising interaction. It has been found that these needs can be divided into two types: the primary communicative need and the secondary communicative needs. The former is the communicative goal of effectively performing advising acts, while the latter relates to the advice-giver’s and the advice-receiver’s face wants, which are interpersonal needs. To satisfy the secondary communicative needs can help to satisfy the primary need. These communicative needs drive advice-givers to construct different identities in academic advising interaction. Constructing one identity can satisfy more than one communicative need, but with different degrees of salience. Furthermore,modifying the default expert identity and making identity shift are also driven by various communicative needs, which are dynamic in the current context of academic advising interaction. Thus, identity construction is a pragmatic strategy in essence.

This chapter has also probed into how the advice-givers’ identity construction is interadaptable to various contextual correlates in the social,mental and physical worlds, because identity construction motivated by satisfying communicative needs occurs in and is constrained by certain contexts. It has been found that identity construction and contextual correlates are interadaptable through the making of linguistic choices in the dynamic process of academic advising interaction. In addition, constructing one identity may be constrained by more than one contextual correlate, but only one of them will become the most salient one for the moment. This indicates that one identity is optimally constructed in the current context and for the current need.

【注释】

[1]Yuan (2011a, pp. 185-186) uses communicative goals instead of communicative needs in his study.

[2]Academic advising interaction in Tracy’s (2002) discussion is different from that in the present study. Tracy (2002, p. 28) has described academic advising interaction like this: “In a college advising situation, advisors ‘decide’ if a student’s past work will account for institutional credit; if a person’s credits match the graduation requirements; if her grade point average meets the entrance requirements for certain majors, and so on. Advisors also guide students toward (or away from) certain majors, jobs, or graduate schools.” This is similar to the academic advising interaction in Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford’s (1990, 1993, 1996)study.

[3]Because the advice-givers are the party with higher power in this type of interaction and the construction of the identity of a knowledgeable expert and the identity of an authoritative expert adapts to their higher power, it in this sense can be considered as a positive adaptation to their power relation. Conversely, the construction of the identity of a modest expert and the identity of an amiable expert tends to conceal their higher power, and thus the construction of these two identities can be considered as a negative adaptation to their power relation. This division is in some sense related to the imposition of advice-giving and its mitigation. Pudlinski (2005, p. 110) divides institutional contexts involving advice-giving into two types: in one context, “the advice-giver is clearly the authority, more overt advice tends to be given,” while in the other context, “the advice-giver also wishes to be seen as friend or equal, more mitigated methods are typically used.”

[4]Face want is examined from different perspectives in this study. Face want discussed here is one of contextual correlates in the mental world, while in Section 7.1 it is one of the communicative needs.

[5]Smiley faces represent participants in this type of interaction.