English Classroom Discourse Analysis Based On Greimasian Narrative Grammar

Current studies on English classroom discourse center on teacher talk, classroom interaction and the right to speak in the classroom, based on theories of linguistics, sociology, cognitive psychology, anthropology and pedagogics. After reviewing the research status of classroom discourse analysis both at home and abroad and discussing its insufficiency, this thesis brings the Greimasian Narrative Grammar into the field of classroom discourse analysis and recommends treating classroom as a verbal text. The two teaching cases of Zhang Hua and Chen Wen (both aliases here) selected carefully from one National English Classroom Teaching Contest of Middle School serve respectively as the positive and negative examples for comparison. This thesis attempts to construct a teaching model that can fully reflect the subjectivity of students.Greimasian Narrative Grammar is concluded from the perspective of function and can be applied to analysis of almost all literary texts. Its wide application in the literary field since its birth proves its theoretical values, but regrettably limited to the exploration of the themes of literary works. It includes three pairs of binary oppositions composed of six actants:subject/object, sender/receiver, helper/opponent. Greimas divided actantial modes into generation of desire, possession of competence, realization of destination and retribution, thus forming the Narrative Grammar.This thesis proposes seeing the teaching process as a narrative process since it’s equipped with all the necessary factors of narrative. Students and the teacher, as the major participants, play the roles of subject and helper respectively. The whole acquisition or impartation of knowledge is compared to a narrative process, with a series of teaching events as plots serving for the development of the final theme. Through the application of Narrative Grammar into classroom discourse analysis, this thesis makes explicit the theme of "students as subject, teacher as helper" and constructs a four-phase language teaching mode.