translate into Chinese. 2. Facebook discourse and identities online
As pointed out by Bolander and Locher (2010), linguistic research on Facebook is far from 
sufficient. It is not until recently that more studies have been underway (West, 2013). Among 
this body of Facebook research, status updates on users’ timeline have been most examined. 
They have been collected with a view to conducting basic textual analysis such as identifying 
the linguistic features (e.g. Lin and Qiu, 2013; Riley, 2013) and speech acts (e.g. Carr et al., 
2012; Ilyas and Khushi, 2012). Seen as a kind of storytelling, status updates have also been 
studied extensively through the lens of narrativity and tellability (e.g. Page, 2010, 2012; 
West, 2013). Page (2010) argued that status updates have good narrative potential and 
capture the lived and situated experience of users although they differ from prototypical 
narratives in certain ways. Page’s analysis indicated that the writing space favored breaking 
news marked by the present or present progressive. Only a small percent of the updates were 
past events. Users also wrote projections, that is, events not actualized by the time of writing. 
In her more recent study, Page (2012) moved on to explore the tellability of status updates. It 
was found that status updates were rather low in tellability in terms of content, partly because 
users would like to protect the face of themselves and others in this relatively open space. 
The updates were on the other hand highly tellable as far as rhetorical style was concerned. It 
was for sociality and achieved by resources such as written out laughter, emoticons, and 
intensifiers. West (2013) unfolded more characteristics of storytelling via Facebook with a 
case study in which the participant wrote small stories about his home remodelling 
experience. One characteristic observed by West was that readers also played a part in 
enhancing the narrativity and tellability, which was achieved by leaving comments and in 
particular asking relevant follow-up questions. In addition to these studies that feature the 
nature of status updates, some studies of timeline have been carried out in connection with 
sociolinguistic themes such as identity construction (e.g. Aguirre and Davies, 2015; Bolander 
and Locher, 2010; Author, 2014), facework (e.g. Davies, 2012; West and Trester, 2013), 
power (Mak and Chui, 2013) and multilingualism (Androutsopoulos, 2013). To summarize, 
while timeline constitutes a major communicative space on Facebook and offers exciting 
linguistic data, other spaces such as event, inbox, group, and page equally merit researchers’
attention. It is also our observation that the existing literature has relied largely on the 
analysis of interpersonal communication. In view of the increasingly diverse use of Facebook, 
there has to be more studies that examine a specific context. These two under-researched 
aspects have thus rendered the present study all the more worthwhile.
Despite limited relevant research, the ones conducted by Ried (2011) and Author (2011) are 
of relevance in terms of the research setting and offer some insights to the present study.
Drawing on Janks’ critical literacy model (2010), Ried (2011) examined how Facebook pages 
for an education course served as a pedagogical space where students brought the “out-of-
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school literacy practice into a schooled space” (p. 60). There were changes in balance of 
power relationships between tutors and students as well as among students. Wider access to 
out-of-school literacy practices not only encouraged diversity, but also enabled students to 
“redesign” concepts they came across throughout the course (p. 73) and construct identities. 
In Hong Kong, Author (2011) conducted exploratory research into a Facebook group for an 
undergraduate course. The purpose was twofold: to evaluate the group’s potential as a 
pedagogical tool and to obtain an overview of the discursive resources and practices within 
the group. It was found that most students, together with the lecturer and tutor, were satisfied 
with the use of Facebook group and that the space accommodated a hybrid of discourses such 
as those for academic and interpersonal purposes. The two studies have opened up the 
possibility of studying how Facebook can be adopted for academic purposes and paved the 
way for more in-depth research on course-based Facebook groups. In contrast to the two 
studies, the current research zooms in on discursive resources and practices of student 
members and teases out how such resources and practices help to reflect their identities.
In the context of offline face-to-face communication, interlocutors express themselves and 
construct identities readily with physical cues or paralinguistic features such as mannerisms 
and tone. On the contrary, interlocutors in text-based computer-mediated communication 
(CMC) lack these tools. The limitations point to the fact that linguistic features become major 
identity markers online. As boyd (2007) pointed out, the users have to “write themselves into 
being” with available linguistic resources (p. 12). Both what and how users express 
themselves become closely connected to their identities (Tagg, 2012). It is thus crucial to 
scrutinize users’ linguistic practices, which are concerned with “the outcome of the relation 
between media constraints and user agency within specific socio-cultural settings” 
(Androutsopoulos, 2010, p. 212). Against this backdrop, a number of studies have been done 
to discern how self is instantiated in the online context over the past decades. Early research 
tended to focus on anonymous settings (e.g. Bechar-Israeli, 1995; Danet et al., 1997). These 
studies not only illustrated how online identities can be constructed through linguistic means, 
but also highlighted that one can be different from who they are in the offline context. As far 
as the aspects of social identity are concerned, gender has been researched extensively in 
CMC literature (e.g. Herring, 1992, 1996; Herring and Zelenkauskaite, 2009; Katsuno and
Yano, 2007; Panyametheekul and Herring, 2007; see Herring and Stoerger (2014) for a 
complete overview). Other facets of social identity, nevertheless, drew little attention from 
researchers as critiqued by Androutsopoulos (2006). As what Vásquez (2014) also identified, 
research in the earlier wave on identities in social media placed undue emphasis on 
participants’ profiles. As a result, the scope was greatly limited by what the pre-set categories 
of personal information offer. The importance of how users construct and enact identities
through what and how they write in key writing spaces was often downplayed. 
Recent years have gradually seen more studies that shift the focus from profiles to other 
spaces in social media. The studies have pushed forward our understanding of the subtle 
relationship between linguistic practices and identities that may be more closely connected to 
who users are in the offline world. There have also been more studies with an interest in other 
aspects of identity. Tagg and Seargeant (2012), for instance, collected informal exchanges on 
Facebook and MSN from Thai-English bilinguals. One interesting finding was that a group of 
participants commented on a photo in which they were tagged on Facebook by consistently 
using letter repetitions. The analysis suggested that the use of letter repetitions did not 
necessarily indicate participants’ genuine interest in the photo per se. The feature was 
deployed, instead, to index a group identity and show that the participants were eager to be 
part of the group. Most recently, Bolander and Locher (2015) studied status updates of 
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individuals in the UK and Switzerland and comments to these updates both qualitatively and 
quantitatively. Participants were found to position themselves by expressing to friends a 
range of aspects, including personality, work, and pastime endeavors. In Aguirre and Davies’ 
(2015) study, their case participant, Amy, asserted the identity as a successful migrant in New 
Zealand by means of place-making and multimodal resources with the affordances of 
timeline as “a communicative and signifying platform” (p. 3). The identity was noticeably 
created for her audience – friends and family in the Philippines. 
Indeed, it is not uncommon that participants are alert to self-presentation and identity 
management in social media; they carefully monitor the linguistic styles they display in 
different spaces. Author’s (2014) study is a case in point. The case participant, Tony, 
revealed that he had developed a series of linguistic practices for different online platforms. 
He avoided code-mixing in forums run and dominated by mainland Chinese so as to hide his 
identity as a Hongkonger. Having two Facebook accounts with one for his friends and the 
other for students and colleagues he met when he was a student teacher, he positioned 
himself differently with the use of contrasting linguistic resources. In the former account, 
Tony employed a wide range of features shared by Hong Kong bilingual CMC users, the 
participants of the present study. On the contrary, he limited himself to using full 
grammatical English in the latter account. Within a course-based Facebook group in which 
the present study is situated, then, it would be interesting to see in what ways student 
members perform identities accordingly with their practices in front of different audiences for 
different purposes.
The studies on identities in social media discussed above have also shown that the social 
constructionist approach to identity seems to be more appropriate, for it captures the 
dynamics, possibilities, and complexities of how people identify themselves through 
interacting with others in different communicative events. It is this approach that we overall 
adopt in this study. In Ivanič’s (1998) words, identity from this perspective is conceptualized 
as “the result of affiliation to particular beliefs and possibilities which are available to … 
[individuals] in their social context” (p. 12). It is not fixed or primordial, as what essentialists 
argue, but socially situated. Identity is even shaped “from moment to moment” in the course 
of interaction (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005, p. 591). Goffman (1959) described identity 
dramaturgically as “a product of scene that comes off … [and] a dramatic effect arising 
diffusely from a scene that is presented” (p. 245). Sometimes, individuals work as a team in a 
community where members “co-operate in staging a single routine”, co-constructing a group 
identity (Goffman, 1959, p. 79). The use of plural form identities is in fact more capable of 
manifesting the multiplicity of self in various social contexts.