Expanding Your Identity on Facebook

Showing the Multilingual Graduate Student Identity

Sergio's English literacy practices on online spaces can be characterized in three types, academic writing, professional communication, and then social communication with English speaker, which differ from his digital literacy practices on Facebook, as illustrated in Excerpt 1.

Excerpt 1 demonstrates how Sergio’s purposes of the use of Facebook can be read as follows: he uses Facebook to construct himself as a serious graduate student identity, and he was highly conscious of the possibility of using Facebook as a space to construct an image. The linguistic expression of the participant was consistent throughout the interview, which did not include any slang expression or nonacademic language. Sergio’s scholar presentation is reinforced by the use of conference images and informational posts on his Facebook wall. Both his banner image and his profile picture display his strong affiliation with the academia.

Sergio’s intentionally use of the two languages, Spanish mainly targeting his friends and relatives both in Spain and in the US, English aiming all of his acquaintances, as illustrated by the Excerpt 2.