Three Email Texts, One Chinese Applicant-Three Versions of "I" Constructed in Student-Faculty Communication

“Taoci” originally means building interpersonal relationship with other persons for practical purposes in Chinese dialect. Against the milieu of the going-abroad-for-education heat in contemporary China, the word of... [ view full abstract ]

“Taoci” originally means building interpersonal relationship with other persons for practical purposes in Chinese dialect. Against the milieu of the going-abroad-for-education heat in contemporary China, the word of “Taoci email”(simplified as “Taoci”) is embezzled to refer to graduate program applicants’ personal email contacts before admission with their targeted foreign supervisors so as to increase their chance of enrollment and scholarship. As a real-site of Chinese English learners’ writing practice, this type of email-writing has, without no regret, received little academic attention around the world except Xiao & Gao (2015). The present research is a qualitative one and aims to explore how a Chinese college student approached and negotiated relationship with an American professor via Taoci email writing across unfolding situations. Different versions of “I”-identity are sorted out, based on prominent linguistic features of pronoun usage, “pronoun+predicate” usage, evaluative vocabulary, discourse content, and speech acts, to reveal the dynamic relational identity construction (Tracy 2002). Furthermore, interview transcripts were used to scaffold the findings of the three versions of discursive self-presentation. This study contributes to a further discussion of intercultural student-faculty email communication and to offering pedagogical implication for ESL/EFL writing in the digital era.