8.1.3 Identity construction adaptive to contextual...
Identity construction in academic advising interaction is motivated by satisfying different communicative needs, which can be generally divided into two types. One is the primary communicative need, while the other is the secondary communicative need. The former is the communicative goal of effectively performing advising acts, while the latter is related to interpersonal needs, which can be further divided into the advice-giver’s positive face want and the advice-receiver’s positive and negative face wants.These communicative needs can be satisfied through constructing different identities in academic advising interaction. The construction of one identity may satisfy more than one communicative needs, but with different degrees of salience. It is also found that making identity modification and making identity shift are driven by various communicative needs in the current context of academic advising interaction. Therefore, identity construction is a pragmatic strategy in essence.
Identity construction motivated by various communicative needs always happens in certain context and is constrained by different contextual correlates in the social world, the mental world and the physical world.Contextual correlates in the social world are mainly the institutional community of practice, modesty, power relation and social distance.Contextual correlates in the mental world are mainly emotion and face want.Only one correlate in the physical world has been found to be adapted to in
identity construction, i.e., the audience in this type of academic interaction.It has also been found that one identity may be constructed to adapt to more than one contextual correlate, but only one of them is usually made salient for the current need. Moreover, identities and contextual correlates are interadaptable through the making of linguistic choices.