Emerging Professional Identity

This chapter concerns what professional identity emerged for the Business English students. By conducting a qualitative examination of five focal students’ experiences of learning Business English at university, the chapter indicates that professional goal, values and perspective on international business professionals, technical competence, and discursive competence were underlying the students’ understanding of international business professionals as well as their evaluation of themselves and were therefore constituting factors for their professional identity. Each of them also developed a unique configuration of these four factors manifesting their emerging professional identity in distinct ways, which illustrates the dual process of identification and negotiability in their professional identity development. Professional identity was thus shown to have rich psychological reality for the Business English students.