Self-Promotion and Identity Construction in Graduate Personal Statements

Abstract

This qualitative corpus-based study investigates the first-person singular pronouns and their possessive determiners in graduate personal statements (PSs) that applicants use to create a self-promotional tenor in their statements. Data consisted on a corpus of 120 English and French PSs collected from four academic disciplines: Linguistics, Sociology, Engineering and Biology. The analysis has shown that the self-promotion strategy employed by the Anglo-American and French applicants shed light on the graduate students’ position and strengthen their identity in their statements. Further, the linguistic investigation revealed remarkable variations in using the self-mention signals across moves, disciplines and languages. With these findings, the study offered valuable theoretical and pedagogical implications regarding the linguistic features of the genre of PSs across various cultures, disciplines and institutional contexts. In addition, they underpin pedagogic self-promotional academic writings and shed light on using this genre as a potential pedagogical tool in classroom activities, particularly in ESL and EFL contexts.