Self-mentions And Authorial Identity Construction In Chinese Learners' English Academic Writing

As an indispensable rhetorical strategy in academic writing,authorial identity not only clarifies writers' academic ideas and contributions,but helps to shape the writer-reader interactive relationship.Self-mentions are the most frequently used linguistic realization of authorial identity construction.Previous studies has demonstrated that learners have difficulty in using self-mentions in academic writing.Research on the construction of authorial identity has mostly focused on the disciplinary and language-cultural differences,and most of these studies take metadiscourse,reporting clause and authorial self as the research objects,while self-mentions,as the most powerful language strategy,have received little attention in academic writing.Basing on that,this paper therefore takes self-mentions as the research object and investigates the discourse functions of self-mentions and features of authorial identity construction by comparing self-mentions employed in Chinese learners' and international scholars' academic writing corpora.The research questions of this study are: 1)What are the distribution features of self-mentions in English masters' thesis written by learners and international journal articles written by international scholars? 2)What are the distribution features of the discourse functions of self-mentions in the two corpora? 3)How do learners use self-mentions to achieve different discourse functions in constructing authorial identity? The research procedures in this study are as follows: Firstly,the software Word Smith5.0 Tools(Scott,2008)is used to retrieve and count the high-frequency self-mentions in the corpora of master's theses and international journal articles.Then,according to the classification standards of Tang and John(1999),the author classifies self-mentions into different discourse functions and compares the frequency differences of these discourse functions in the two corpora.Finally,further analysis of the characteristics of authorial identity construction of learners will be made.The major findings are as follows: Compared with international scholars,learners significantly less use self-mentions in general but with a tendency of choosing low-risk self-mentions and deliberately avoiding high-risk self-mentions,which shows learners' lower consciousness of authorial identity construction;there is great difference in the distribution of the discourse functions of self-mentions in the two corpora.Compared with international scholars,learners significantly more use representative function and less use opinion-holder function.In addition,learners prefer to weaken their responsibilities in writing strategies when expressing discourse functions with higher identity visibility,which shows learners' relatively implicit authorial identity;learners tend to use low-risk self-mentions to express discourse functions with lower identity visibility and deliberately avoid expressing discourse functions with higher identity visibility in the process of constructing authorial identity,which reduces authority of authorial identity.Besides,we also find that learners have a mastery of architect function with relatively lower identity visibility and recounter function with relatively higher identity visibility,but some incorrect or inappropriate expressions exist in learners' corpus,which is not conducive to the construction of authorial identity.It is therefore suggested that in English academic teaching,more attentions should be focused on training learners' comprehension of the relationship between self-mentions and their discourse functions so as to raise learner's awareness of authorial identity construction for the purpose of improving their academic writing level.