A Study Of Discursive Construction Of Pre-service English Teachers’ Pragmatic Identity

In recent years,there has been a growing interest in the relationship between identity construction and discursive practices.Pragmatic identity,regarded as contextualized social identity and constructed by various discursive practices in various contexts,provides a new perspective for studying the discursive construction of teachers’ identity.Currently,research on teachers’ pragmatic identity construction has primarily focused on in-service teachers,with scant attention given to the discursive construction of pragmatic identities among preservice English teachers.This study examined the discursive practices of seven pre-service teachers during their practicum,using Pragmatic Identity Theory as a theoretical basis.Through the qualitative research method,the following two research questions were explored:1)What types of pragmatic identities did pre-service English teachers construct through discursive practices in their teaching practicum?2)How did pre-service English teachers construct these pragmatic identities through discursive practices in their teaching practicum?The data analysis yielded the following findings.First,the pre-service English teachers mainly constructed four types of pragmatic identities through discursive practices in their teaching practicum:an authoritative teacher,a knowledgeable teacher,a friendly teacher,and a cooperative teacher.Second,pre-service English teachers dynamically constructed the four pragmatic identities through different discursive practices.The authoritative teacher was mainly constructed by the discursive practices,like person-referencing(first-person pronoun,etc.),directive speech acts and discourse features;the knowledgeable teacher,by knowledge-based discourse content and representative speech acts;the friendly teacher,by discourse content concerning personal topics and person-referencing like inclusive "we",etc.;the cooperative teacher,by expressive speech acts and lexical choices.Theoretically,the current study broadens the range of applications of the Pragmatic Identity Theory to the analysis of pre-service English teachers’ pragmatic identity construction.Practically,the findings of this study enlighten pre-service English teachers to better understand how to construct multi-faceted identities by selecting discursive practices in the classroom to improve the effectiveness of interaction and teaching.