Discourse and Identity (Brain Paltridge) Mind Map

The earliest studies into the relationship between language and identity were based on a variationist perspective; that is, they looked at the relationship between social variables such as social class in terms of variation in the use of linguistic variables such as certain features of pronunciation, or the use of non-standard grammar.

Post-structural Studies A post-structural perspective on language and identity, seeing identity 'as something that is in constant process' (Swann et al. 2004 :140- 1) arguing that it is through language, or rather through discourse, that identity is principally forged.

The information a person 'gives off' about themself, and in turn, their identity, depends very much on the context, occasion and purpose of the discourse. It also depends on the 'space' and 'place' of the interaction (Blommaert 2005).

Examples

It is not just through the performance of identities that they are created, however. It is also by the fact that they are recognized by other participants in the interactions. In Blommaert's ( 2005 : 205) words, 'a lot of what happens in the field of identity is done by others, not by oneself'.

Thomas ( 2007 ) has explored the issues of language and identity in online chat environments, a very particular place and space. With a focus on adolescent 'cybergirls', she examines how girls use words and images to establish online identities which reflect both their fantasies and their desires in this particular setting. She does an analysis of both the words and the images that they use to create their identities. In their online environment, the cybergirls interacted with words, symbols for words, as well as various other symbols such as emoticons and 'avatars' (visual characters which express a certain identity) in order to establish their online identities. One of her participants, Violetta, talked about how she wrote online to convey a particular persona

Identity is as much an issue in written discourse as it is in spoken discourse. This is particularly the case in student academic writing. Hyland ( 2002 c) discusses the view that is often presented to students that academic writing is faceless, impersonal discourse. Students are told, he says, 'to leave their personalities at the door' when they write and not use personal pronouns such as I which show what is being said is the student's view or place in things. As Hyland ( 2002 c: 352) argues, 'almost everything we write says something about us and the sort of relationship that we want to set up with our readers'. Indeed, one of the ways that expert academic writers do this, in some academic disciplines at least, is using the pronoun 'I'.

Establishing writer identity is, however, something that is often difficult for second language writers. This is often complicated by students bringing a different writer 'voice' from their first language setting to the second language writing situation (Fox 1994 ). Students may come from backgrounds where they have considerable standing in their field of study and find it difficult to be told they need to take on the voice of a novice academic writer, and hide their point of view, as they write in their second language. Hirvela and Belcher ( 2001 ) argue that teachers need to know more about the ways students present themselves in their first language writing and about their first language and culture identities so they can help students deal with the issue of identity in their second language writing

Students are taught how to maintain their identity while writing on any discipline by using certain tactics and strategies. • They must show control over what they are writing. • Self representation is highly encouraged in academic writing to maintain social identity throughout the academic discourse. • Writers have multiple alternative to choose to maintain their identity. 1. Self-mentioning (I, we, my) 2. Hedges (Might, Perhaps) 3. Boosters (definitely, in fact) 4. Attitude markers (unfortunately, surprisingly)

Examples of stance and engagement strategies in academic writing (based on Hyland 2005c) Laboratory may cause artificial formatior of embolism. With a few interesting exceptions, we obviously do not see a static image as moving. This seems highly dubious. The first clue of this emerged when we noticed a quite extraordinary result. This experience contains ideas derived from reading I have done. Although we ack knowledge about a definitive biological function for... And - as I believe many TESOL professional will readily acknowledge - critical thinking has nov begun to make its mark. Of course, we know that the indigenous communities of today have been reorganized by the catholic church... It is important to note that these results do indeed warrant the view that... Is it, in fact, necessary to choose between nature and nurture?

Despite its sometimes-aimless appearance and apparently trivial content, casual conversation is, in fact, a highly structured, functionally motivated, semantic activity. Motivated by interpersonal needs continually to establish who we are, how we relate to others, and what we think of how the world is, casual conversation is a critical linguistic site for the negotiation of such important dimensions of our social identity as gender, generational location, sexuality, social class membership, ethnicity, and subcultural and group affiliations.

Significance of Casual Conversation

When we speak (or write), then, we are telling other people "something about ourselves" (Cameron 2001 :170) and relating to people in particular ways. Identity, thus, is a joint, two-way production. Identity, further, is not just a matter of using language in a way that reflects a particular identity. It is rather a socially constructed self that people continually co-construct and reconstruct in their interactions with each other. This leads to different ways of doing identity with different people in different situations.

A person's identity then: is not something fixed, stable and unitary that they acquire early in life and possess forever afterwards. Rather identity is shifting and multiple, something people are continually constructing and reconstructing in their encounters with each other in the world, (ibid.)

Young people tend to portray fake identities on social media and online platforms to associate themselves with their favorite discourse communities.