Abstract
This research taps into the identity construction in “Taoci” email, a discursive practice popular among Chinese study-abroad applicants. Following a qualitative approach, we focus on one Chinese student’s emails to the same American professor. English Taoci emails and interviews have been collected as research data. Detailed linguistic analysis has been proceeded with the distinctive linguistic features of pronoun usage, “pronoun+predicate” pattern, evaluative vocabulary, discourse content and speech acts. Three relational identities have been found:  I(maxium) identity, I(to you) identity, and I(and you) identity based on the linguistic features. The interview transcripts are used to scaffold the dynamic discursive building in the emails. It is hoped that this study would contribute to discussion on discourse identity and shed light on intercultural student-faculty email communication in the e-world.
Highlights
Introduction“Taoci”, written in Chinese characters as “套磁”, originally means building interpersonal relationship with other persons for practical purposes, mainly through linguistic means
This research taps into the identity construction in “Taoci” email, a discursive practice popular among Chinese study-abroad applicants
Since the current research is on the email by a Chinese student to a Caucasian professor in the US, we mainly review the literature on English email of EFL/ESL learners
Summary
“Taoci”, written in Chinese characters as “套磁”, originally means building interpersonal relationship with other persons for practical purposes, mainly through linguistic means. The research claimed that non-native speakers used direct request, little downgraders, improper forms of address and omitted necessary greetings and closings in email writing These pragmatically inappropriate uses would inflict negative impression upon native English speakers. Pan (2011) found that due to the unequal status between students and faculty, students tended to be indirect in general and demonstrated less capability of employing certain syntactic devices like downgraders in requests Such researches have problematized non-native English learners as less pragmatically successful and usually proposed at the end to involve email writing into syllabus design or to cultivate cross-language pragmatic competence or cross-cultural skills. Attempts to analyze the same emailer presenting different selves to the same correspondent and reveal the adaptability of linguistic features against situational changes
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