Discursive Construction Of Teachers' Identities In English Class Teaching

Teachers'talk plays a very important part in teaching. It is not only the medium of teaching, but also the main source of comprehensible input which learners are likely to receive in English classrooms. However, researches at home and abroad are devoting to the linguistic characteristics of teachers'discourse such as code-switching, sentence types, feedback in teachers'talk and their impact on learners, ignoring the social factors in teachers'talk (Pica & Long,1986; Zhou Xing & Zhou Yun,2002; Zhao Chen,2005). That is to say, studies on identity and discourse in the educational settings are not as prevalent as in other social settings like medical system, television talk program and public speech.Identity is an abstract, complex and dynamic concept. Simply speaking, it is "a person's conception of self within a particular social, geographical, cultural and political context" (Yep,2002, p61). The prime objective of the study is to provide an empirical investigation on identity construction of different English teachers in senior high schools by displaying the real situation of teachers' talk in classes. Specifically, it seeks to answer the following question:how teachers'three main identities, namely professional, personal and relational identities are constructed in discourses. In light of Fairclough's analytical framework, teachers'talk from the Sixth National Observation and Conference of High School Teaching is scrutinized from perspectives of self reference, topic analysis, politeness, exchange structure and modality to illustrate how these discursive devices are employed by teachers to construct their professional identity, personal identity and relational identity.The results of this study reveal that teachers'identities in English class teaching in China are discursively constructed and negotiated. Teachers build their identities by employing a set of discursive devices and these multiple identities are complicatedly interwoven with each other. Professionally, teachers position themselves as authorities through the use of the agentive "I", topic control, low degree of politeness, the IRF structure and high modality. Personally, teachers project themselves as individuals by means of the pronoun "I", subjective modality and personal topics. And teachers achieve their relational identities as a member of the class through the use of the inclusive "we" low modality, shared topics and high degree of politeness. Identity construction is context-sensitive and context-renewing and when one type of identity is made especially salient, other aspects of identity are suppressed.The present paper is composed of five chapters. After the introduction in Chapter 1, it reviews the previous studies related with discourse analysis and teaching discourses as the starting point for a more detailed analysis of identity construction of English teachers in classroom. It then moves on to deal with the theoretical framework in Chapter 3, which lays the theoretical basis for this study. Chapter 4 is devoted to a detailed analysis of discursive construction of teachers'professional identity, personal identity and relational identity. Based on theories of identity-as-performance, several texts from classroom exchanges from the Sixth National Observation and Conference of High School Teaching in 2006 are analyzed in this chapter to contribute to identity construction of teachers. In the last chapter, it concludes with findings, implications and limitations, and makes some prospects for further study.