A Study On The Teacher Identity Construction In The Ideological And Political Education Of College English Courses:A Multimodal Conversation Analysis Perspective

The research on the identity construction of college English teachers is the core issue of college English teaching.Extant research shows that in college English classrooms that focus on the transmission of English knowledge and ability training,teachers mainly construct multimodal pragmatic identities of knowledgeable teachers,authoritative teachers,friendly teachers and peer teachers through speech and behavior.The introduction of the new educational concept of “ideological and political education” provides an opportunity for ideological and political education to be integrated into college English courses,and the concept of college English teaching has also undergone an ideological and political shift,i.e.,the original emphasis on knowledge transfer and skills training has changed to one where knowledge transfer,competency development and ideological and political education go hand in hand.Thus the status of college English teachers has also changed.Based on the multimodal conversation analysis method,this study selects the lecture videos of teachers participating in the national finals of the “Teaching Star” contest with the theme of ideological and political education by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press as the data and analyzes them in depth through transcription as well as using ELAN and PRAAT in order to explore the construction of teacher’s multimodal pragmatic identity.The following two research questions are explored:(1)How do teachers use the synergy of verbal and non-verbal modalities to construct their identities in ideological and political education in college English courses?(2)What identity do college English teachers construct in ideological and political education?A detailed step-by-step microanalysis yielded enlightening findings.(1)Teachers use spoken modality,body modality,and PPT modality to construct identity in ideological and political education.Moreover,they are able to make the multimodal resources work together to maximize the information conveyed to students and achieve the best teaching effect.(2)Research shows that teachers constructed three new pragmatic identities in the ideological and political education of college English courses: critical thinking cultivators,patriotism motivators and values leaders.The teachers used different combinations of modal resources in the process of constructing these three different identities,and each had its own characteristics.This research has enriched the dimensions of teacher identity construction,extended the multimodal pragmatic analysis framework,and proposed a new approach to exploring the use of multimodal resources to construct teachers’ pragmatic identity.However,this thesis mainly explores the teachers’ use of multimodal resources.As the audience,the dynamic process of students’ receptiveness,feedback and actual participation in the teachers’ multimodal discourse also needs further in-depth study.Future research directions could focus more on the classroom interaction processes between teachers and students in order to gain more insights into teaching and research.