A Study Of Intertextuality In The Discursive Construction Of Teacher-student Relationship

In the contemporary Chinese society, great changes have taken place since its opening up in 1979. These changes are not only seen in the field of economy, but also in other walks of life such as education. One example of such changes is that of the views of the teacher and student (T-S) relations. The traditional relationship between teacher and student, that is, the dominance of the teacher over the student, is challenged and is no longer the only mode of T-S relations. New and multiple T-S relations are constructed and experienced by teachers and students. The author of this thesis is interested in investigating the newly appearing T-S relations and, by examining a forum organized in China Youth Daily, this thesis attempts to investigate how these T-S relations are discursively constructed. This study, from the linguistic perspective, uses critical discourse analysis and the theory of intertextuality, analyses four typical articles from the forum, to explore discourse strategies of building the relationship between teachers and students.Different scholars have different perspectives on discourse. We overview the mainstream linguistic notion of discourse, the notion of discourse developed from social sciences and CDA's view of discourse. In this paper, following CDA's perspective on discourse, we consider discourse as social practice. That is, discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned.In this paper, we carry out the manifest intertextual analysis and the constitutive intertextual analysis of the samples. Through the analysis, we find that the forum held by China Youth Daily not only reveals the social reality but tries to construct it. Through discussing teacher-student relationship, they intend to build democratic, equal and operative relationship between them. And the strategies of intertextuality make the discursive construction of T-S relation possible.