Teacher Identity Construction From The Perspective Of Conversation Analysis

Teacher identity construction has always drawn great attention in applied linguistics.Scholars have explored teacher identity from the macroscopic perspective,such as narrative inquiry and critical discourse analysis,while other scholars have explored it from the microscopic perspective,such as adopting conversation-analytic approach,speech act theory,etc.Although great achievements have been made in the study of teacher identity construction,few scholars have adopted the conversational analytic framework for institutional conversation in studying teacher identity.Besides,not enough study has been carried out concerning the identity construction of foreign teachers.Thus researching identity construction of foreign teachers from the perspective of conversation analysis is worthy of thorough exploration.Twelve periods of oral English class are recorded and transcribed in this study.The transcribed data are then analyzed to study the identity construction of the foreign teacher based on conversation analysis.The thesis attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What kinds of identity are constructed in class?What kinds of identity does the foreign teacher tend to construct?(2)What kinds of conversational strategies are adopted in each type of identity construction respectively?Qualitative and quantitative methods are both adopted in answering these questions.The case in this study is a foreign teacher,who gives lectures to English major undergraduate students.Firstly,his lessons in Class Four are observed and recorded.Then the recordings are transcribed with a software called Nvivo 11,which specialized in qualitative research.Secondly,every class is analyzed carefully to determine the different identities constructed at different stages of a class.Thirdly,the total amount of time and the frequency of constructing each identity are computed to demonstrate which types of identity are constructed most frequently.Lastly,some typical excerpts are chosen and analyzed from four dimensions,namely turn-taking,sequence organization,turn design and lexical choice,to show the conversational strategies adopted by the foreign teacher.Major findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)The foreign teacher’s identity construction is not stable.He has constructed six identities in oral English class in all,which are communicator,instructor,cultural learner,cultural disseminator and alienator.The quantitative study of the time used and the frequency of each type of identity construction demonstrates that John tends to construct as a communicator,an instructor and an organizer more frequently.(2)The foreign teacher adopts different types of conversational strategies in different types of identity construction.When he constructs as a communicator,the pedagogical goal is to create a communicative context in which students are encouraged to talk in order to enhance their language output and oral fluency.In this case,the teacher exerts little control over turn-taking.The classroom interaction is characterized by the use of referential questions,Designedly Incomplete Utterances and minimal repair of mistakes.The lexical choice is very informal.He constructs as a democratic communicator,an equal participant in classroom activities.When the foreign teacher constructs as an instructor,the pedagogical goal is mainly to inculcate knowledge in students.He has a tight control over the turn-taking.The classroom interaction is characterized by the use of Initiation-Response-Feedback(IRF)pattern,confirmation checks,display questions,increment,transitional markers,etc.Teacher turns function both as an assessment of students’ answers and an initiation of another question.When the foreign teacher constructs as an organizer,the pedagogical goal is to arrange students to do a certain task.He exerts a tight control over the turn-taking.The classroom interaction is characterized by the use of transitional markers,confirmation checks,parallel structure,repetition and the frequent occurrence of personal pronoun "we".The use of "want","need"and "be going to"makes his directions mild and readily acceptable to students.When the pedagogical goals are concerned with cultural elements,the foreign teacher constructs either as a cultural learner or as a cultural disseminator.In both cases,he exerts partial control over the turn-taking system.The classroom interaction is characterized by the use of IRF pattern,confirmation checks and referential questions.The teacher turns assess students’ answers and initiate another question.But unlike his identity as a cultural learner when the interaction is more informal,he adopts corrective repair to present the right answers to students when he constructs as a cultural disseminator.Lastly,when the foreign teacher constructs as an alienator,he fails to achieve the pedagogical goals.The interaction is characterized by long teacher turns and short learner turns and no change of turn-taking.This research is both theoretically and pedagogically important.Theoretically,it supplies more empirical data to the study of foreign teacher identity.It also reveals the instability and variability of teacher identity from a microscopic perspective and offers a new perspective in understanding teacher identity.Pedagogically,this research is endowed with practical value in language teaching.Through the analyses of different identities constructed,this study enables foreign teachers to be fully aware of their identity construction.Thus,they can adopt specific conversationalstrategies to construct appropriate identities to enhance student classroom participation.