The Discursive Construction Of Teacher’s Professional Identity In Teacher-student Interaction

Over the past ten years, research on discourse and identity has witnessed vigorous growth and become one of the most important research subjects across several research fields such as anthropology, linguistics, education, sociology and so on. Recently, the research on the discursive construction of identity has been receiving more and more attention, holding the view that identity is a dynamic process that takes place in concrete and specific interactional occasions and entails discursive work. The language in use in specific contexts plays an important role in identity construction. Under this background, this study is committed to exploring the discursive construction process of the teacher’s professional identity in teacher-student interactions.Different from the previous studies on professional identity construction which mostly regard professional identity as a result of discursive construction, this study focuses on how microscopic discourse identities and situated identities help enact the teacher’s macroscopic professional identity construction, emphasizing the discursive construction process of professional identity. Specifically, this study attempts to answer three questions:how the teacher’s professional identity in teacher-student interaction is constructed discursively through the situated identities construction; what situated identities are constructed; and what discourse strategies are employed and how these discourse strategies are used to the discursive construction of these situated identities. To answer these questions, interactions between a supervisor and her postgraduates have been chosen as our research data. In terms of the research method, because interactional sociolinguistics focuses on making an explanatory and detailed analysis of the interaction to understand the process of identity construction and re-construction, we choose interactional sociolinguistics as an analytical tool to analyze the discursive construction process of the teacher’s professional identity in this case study.The research findings demonstrate that during the whole interaction the teacher’s three situated identities, namely a director of students’participation, a controller of the interaction procedures and a solidarity builder in the interactions are constructed mainly by the use of five discourse strategies, namely questioning strategy, supportive verbal feedbacks strategy, turn-taking strategy, positive evaluation strategy and verbal humor strategy (these discourse strategies construct such discourse identities as a questioner, a listener, a turn allocator, a positive evaluator and so on in the process of situated identities construction). Through the construction of these three situated identities, the teacher’s professional identity construction is enacted accordingly.This study contributes to the relevant research in the several ways. Firstly, this study demonstrates that interactional sociolinguistics approach can be used to analyze the discursive construction of teacher’s professional identity in teacher-student interactions, therefore expanding the research scope of this analytical approach. Secondly, Different from the "top-down" or macro discourse analytic methods often used in professional identity researches, this study adopts a microscopic "bottom-up" discourse analysis method for the professional identity construction, making a complement to the teacher’s professional identity studies. Thirdly, the research findings provide empirical significance to the teacher-student interactions. The discourse strategies analyzed in this study can inspire other supervisors to use such discourse strategies that can direct students’active participation and deepen the solidarity between teacher and students during the interactions, making an empirical significance to the interactions between supervisor and postgraduates.