International Forum on Frontier Issues in Applied Linguistics (al2020)

27 / 2020-07-05 10:57:40

The ‘I’ in RA Introductions: An Investigation into Chinese L2 PhD Students’ Self-Mentions and the Projection of Multiple Identity Roles

self-mention, writer identity, academic writing, EAP

Forum on Frontier Issues in Applied Linguistics > English for special purpose

A short introduction
This study attempts to explore Chinese L2 PhD students’ application of self-mentions and how they construct multiple identity roles through first person pronouns in their RA Introductions, by making a comparison of the academic discourses between Chinese L2 PhD students from social sciences in Chongqing University and experts in the corresponding discipline. It is found that students used self-mentions much less than experts, and there were statistically significant differences of the use of we-family and I-family self-mentions between the two; however, no difference was found of the choices of low and high presence of identity roles, which was a relatively more positive result compared with many previous studies.