Abstract
The current study aims to investigate the discursive construction and navigation of agency in oral narratives of English learning by Chinese college English majors. Based on the theoretical framework integrating Bamberg et. al.’s theory of identity dilemma and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, the study has addressed two research questions: 1) How do the speakers construct different levels of agency in their narratives? 2) How do the speakers navigate among different levels of agency throughout their narratives? The research data comes from monthly-based individual interviews with the participants for one year, from which significant English-learning stories are selected. Then transitivity analysis and logico-semantic analysis are conducted to the stories clause by clause so as to find out the linguistic patterns for agency construction and navigation. The study has found that speakers construct different levels of agency with various transitivity patterns, and navigate the agency dilemma by moving back and forth among different levels of agency with various logico-semantic relations. It has also illustrated that agency is not a fixed entity that a speaker possesses, but constructed and negotiated dynamically by the speaker all the way through his/her narratives.
Highlights
The current study aims to investigate the discursive construction and navigation of agency in oral narratives of English learning by Chinese college English majors
Based on the theoretical framework integrating Bamberg et al.’s theory of identity dilemma and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, the study has addressed two research questions: 1) How do the speakers construct different levels of agency in their narratives? 2) How do the speakers navigate among different levels of agency throughout their narratives? The research data comes from monthly-based individual interviews with the participants for one year, from which significant English-learning stories are selected
Transitivity analysis and logico-semantic analysis are conducted to the stories clause by clause so as to find out the linguistic patterns for agency construction and navigation
Summary
The current study aims to investigate the discursive construction and navigation of agency in oral narratives of English learning by Chinese college English majors. Transitivity analysis and logico-semantic analysis are conducted to the stories clause by clause so as to find out the linguistic patterns for agency construction and navigation. There are joyful stories, sad stories, ambitious stories, gloomy stories, and very often the author is deeply carried into their story world, cheered, grieved, inspired or depressed From the stories they told and the way they told the stories, the author comes to understand how the English majors, as variously agentive beings, construct and negotiate their relationship to the social world across time and space through English learning. Having been trained as a linguist, the author realizes that such investigations must be engaged with proper linguistic techniques of analysis, especially for textual micro-analysis Her training within systemic functional linguistics (SFL) has convinced her that its grammatics has considerable potential for such work. It provides a comprehensive tool-kit to bridge meaning and form, and for this particular study, to investigate the construction and navigation of agency through linguistic forms
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
