Discursive Construction of Professional Identity

Abstract

This chapter takes the Business English students’ writing in business genres as a site for enacting their emerging professional identity and focuses on how they deployed business genre knowledge in their writing to index their professional identity. By drawing on a discourse analysis of their writing and interviews with them, the chapter demonstrates that the students’ deployment of business genre knowledge was not random but based on their perceived professional norms, practices, and expertise. Their business genre knowledge was therefore the source of indexing devices or indexicals for their professional identity. The chapter illustrates their use of indexicals on the formal, process, rhetorical, and subject-matter dimensions of business genre knowledge in their discursive construction of professional identity.