Teachers’ pragmatic identity construction strategies in undergraduates’ dissertation defense

Pragmatic identity refers to interlocutors’ identities dynamically constructed within specific interaction contexts to achieve intended communication purposes. Its constructional process involves four stages: communication needs, pragmatic construction, discursive choices, and communicative outcome, which align with the transition of identity conceptualisation from essentialism to constructivism. Since the last decade, identity researchers have begun to pay close attention to teachers’ pragmatic identities. However, the current research is predominantly conducted in classroom and postgraduate academic settings. The undergraduate academic context, the fundamental and significant stage of tertiary education, has been relatively ignored.

Against this backdrop, this study aims to explore teachers’ identity construction strategies in undergraduates’ dissertations defence from the pragmatic identity perspective. The qualitative case study is situated in the English majors’ dissertations defence conducted by a regular college in eastern China. The discursive practices of pragmatic identity construction (Chen, 2013) are utilized as an analytical framework for discourse analysis. Maximum variation sampling is used to purposefully select six teachers from the dissertation defence council as the participants, ensuring a diverse representation of teachers’ professional titles and length of teaching experience. Two main instruments are employed to collect data: video recording for discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews for theme analysis.

First, the researcher video-records the sessions of dissertation defence groups, including the six participants. Second, the researcher arranges face-to-face semi- structured interviews with the six participants individually. Theoretically, the study broadens the research boundary of teachers’ pragmatic identities by providing a fresh viewpoint in the undergraduate dissertation supervision context. Accordingly, it attracts more pragmatic scholars to consider the discourse of feedback, interaction manners, and quality of bachelor's dissertation supervision. Practically, the findings provide specific guidelines for supervisors on constructing pragmatic identities to communicate effectively with their undergraduate mentees to warrant research standards.