Chinese scientists' English research articles in local and international publications

: exploring the construction of writer identity

Abstract

Academic writing has been prevalently conceived as part of scholarly literacy substantiated via textual competency, institutional practice and socio-political implications (Flowerdew, 2008; Lillis & Curry, 2006; Swales, 2004). Given English as the lingua franca in scientific publishing (Swales, 2004; A. Wood, 2001), multilingual academics find this "joint enterprise" an inevitable interplay of local and international community engagement and alignment (Canagarajah, 2002b; Casanave, 2002; Curry & Lillis, 2004). The present thesis reports on English research articles in local and international publications of vernacularly-educated materials scientist writers in Mainland China. Corpus-based and ethnographically-inspired studies of this two-part genre analysis are integrated under the umbrella of Bhatia's (2004) multidimensional and multi-perspective approach to written discourse. In particular, an integrative model of writer identity is developed as the analytical lens on the basis of Ivanic's (1998) clover-leaf model and Wenger's (1998) social ecology of identity. The first part of this study is based on a self-compiled corpus of research articles in materials science so as to examine discursive construction of writer identity across three different contexts, viz., L2 English texts domestically and internationally published and L1 Chinese texts locally circulated. Such identity markers as metadiscourse markers self-mentions, as-past-participial prefabricates, technical nouns, and rhetorical moves/steps are examined in this part. Two case studies are furthermore conducted to supplement the aforementioned corpus-based analysis by resorting to interviews and microhistories of focus papers. These two research subjects mainly differ in their professional status and patterns of discourse strategies consumed in response to their own understandings of multi-membership. The intensity and efficacy of local contingencies vis-à-vis global socio-cultural contrast is explored to locate their socio-historic construction of writer identity in the course of aligning with different levels of discourse community. Case Study One (i.e., Chapter Six) outlines dynamic and multiple writer identities of a junior researcher while Case Study Two (i.e., Chapter Seven) specializes in fluid and conflicting writer identities of an experienced staff. This current research has offered an integrative and relatively thick description of recontextualization or discourse-switching (Canagarajah, 2002b) among a special group of multilingual academics. In particular, the research lens of writer identity has made it possible to better understand discursive practices of vernacularly-educated scholars. It may develop applied linguists' long-standing interest in "small" disciplinary and institutional cultures (Atkinson, 2004; Connor, 2004), and more specifically, promotes our appreciation of the discursive reality and disciplinary socialization of Chinese materials scientist writers.

Date of Award	3 Oct 2011
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Vijay Kumar BHATIA (Supervisor)