An Exploratory Study of the Pragmatic Self Concept and Temporality in English Language Self-Narratives of Japanese Students

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-2014

Disciplines

Anthropology | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology

Abstract

How is the self-concept communicated in self-narratives? This study looks at how people use "self" and "other" referents as well as verb tenses to describe themselves in short introductory narrative essays. Participants also completed versions of the Myers-Briggs and DISC inventories as a means of evaluating whether "personality" attributes might be correlated to aspects of self-concept. For a sample of thirty-three college students enrolled in a semester-long, content-based English language course at a Japanese university, it was found that a common template of pronoun and verb tense components could be adequately scaled. Using factor analysis and multiple regression techniques, a composite model based upon two versions of the pragmatic view of the self is presented.

Comments

Presented by Jeffrey Kamakahi at the annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities (HICAH) in Honolulu, Hawaii, on January 13, 2014. The full conference proceedings are available at http://www.hichumanities.org/proceedings_hum.php.

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