作者:校园英语杂志社 字数:2733 点击:

作者:路凌霄
  1. Introduction
  This paper adopts one approach-the narrative approach to conduct a research on an example of workplace communication. The example is concerning a one to one career consultation between a student job seeker (the author) and the UCL career consultant. The data was collected and transcribed with the consent of the career consultant. The reason of conducting this research derives from the student job seeker’s strong resolution for demonstrating herself that she wants to seek for an occupation as a broadcast journalist. Thus, it is of vital importance for the author to adopt the above approach to analyse how the student constructs her identity through narratives. The research question is:
  How does the student job seeker use narratives to construct particular identities that could be regarded as reasons for becoming a broadcast journalist?
  2.The Narratives Approach
  According to Labov (2013:14), “a narrative is the presentation in discourse of a sequence of past events.” Consensus that “temporal order is the fundamental criterion that distinguishes narratives from other forms of discourse” (Mishler 2006:31) has been reached by scholars. In fact,, narrative, as defined by “temporal juncture”, is only one of many ways of dealing with the past . So why does the author adopt this approach? The major reason is that narratives are inherently related to identity construction due to the way they position different characters and the narrator (Ibid). Thus, the author could adopt it as an approach to analyze how the student constructs her identities. Besides, the classic model of Labov and Walesky (1967) provides clear analysis of sequence of stories told by the narrator, shedding light on how the narrator constructs her identities. The classic model of Labov and Walesky (1967) includes six core features: the abstract-a summary of a story; The orientation-information of the time, the place, the persons, and the behavior involved; The complicating action-the main focus leading to a climax; The evaluation-the interpreter’s assessment of what had taken place; The resolution-an outcome that brings the elements of the story together; The coda-the end of the story, connecting the story to the present.
  3. Data
  The data consists of a verbal transcription of the audio recording concerning a one to one career consultation between a student (me) and the UCL career consultant. The data context is regarding the career consulting context. The data is partly transcribed by using Jefferson (2004) Transcription System.