Identity projection in the oral presentations of Colombian PhD students: Disciplinary differences

Abstract

This study analyses how Colombian PhD-level EAP students use pronouns in their oral presentations (OPs) to construct and project their academic and language learning selves. Pronoun use was explored in a corpus of 58 OPs transcriptions (47728 tokens) to identify (1) the types of identity projected, phraseology, and discourse functions performed and (2) how these varied in terms of the disciplines represented in the study (hard vs soft). To achieve these objectives, quantitative (normalised frequencies, statistical significance) analyses were performed. These were complemented with corpus and discourse analysis procedures. The analyses show that disciplinary knowledge and not individual variation influences pronoun selection and identity projection. Hard fields favour the selection of pronouns and discourse devices that reflect their methodological practices while soft fields favour the expression of opinions regarding existing knowledge in the soft disciplines. This report concludes discussing the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical implications of the findings, which might be generalized to any context where academic identity construction and projection in EAP is researched or taught.