Yuqin Hei to present CORE lecture
Professor Yuqin Hei, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, will give the free talk “A Comparative Study of Author Identity in English and Chinese Academic Writing” on Wednesday, February 12 at 12 noon in the Don Gevirtz Boardroom, 4th Floor, Education Building. The event is sponsored by the Gevirtz School’s CORE (Conversations on Research in Education) Lunch Series. All members of the UCSB community are invited to attend; please bring your lunch – light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP to Carla Whitacre by Monday, February 10 if you plan on attending: cwhitacre@education.ucsb.edu.
Professor Hei’s research focuses on author identity represented, both implicitly and explicitly, in English and Chinese conference abstracts (CAs). First, a basic quantitative analysis was conducted to find out the distribution of different authorial roles realized by the context-specific noun phrases (this paper/study/researcher/author) and the first person singular and plural pronouns (we and I) in the subject position. Then, a qualitative analysis was employed to explore reasons behind the distinctive features found in the use of the linguistic devices, by referring to different social and cultural backgrounds, discourse communities, and writing conventions as well as the genre and discipline. By analyzing author identity in English and Chinese CAs, this study aims to extend the current contrastive study on academic discourse.
Yuqin Hei is a Professor of English Studies at Xi’an International Studies Universities, Shaanxi, China. Her sponsor at the Gevirtz School is Professor Charles Bazerman of the Department of Education.