High School Novice English Teachers’ Identity Construction: A Perspective Of Discourse Analysis

Among all the present researchers about classroom teaching, teachers’ discourse has obviouslybecome the focus at home and abroad. However, researchers both at home and abroad pay moreattention to the way of feedback in teachers’ discourse, teachers’ body language and types ofteachers’ discourse, ignoring the relationship between teachers’ discourse and teachers’ identity(Pica&Long,1986; Zhou Xing&Zhou Yun,2002; Zhao Chen,2005). Therefore, this thesis takes highschool novice English teachers as an example, trying to reveal their identity construction processfrom the perspective of discourse analysis.In this thesis, the author studies the identity construction by means of Ken Hyland’smeta-discourse theory from perspectives of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mention andFairclough’s analytical framework from perspectives of turn-taking, politeness, exchange structureandmodalitytoexplorenoviceEnglishteacher’sdiscourseinclassrooms.Therefore in this thesis, the author proposes to investigate how the teachers’professional identityis established through conversational strategies. The main research questions are as follows:1). How many types of professional identities of novice English teachers in high school can beclassified into during the interaction between teachers and students？2). How these identities are represented in the discourses?The data of research comes from the four novice English teachers of the High School Attachedto Hunan Normal University, who are two males and two females getting their Bachelor degree in2012. The author recorded four teachers’ classes for two months. Then after repeated listening andselection, eight texts from the four teachers were chosen for case studies and achieved followingconclusion:1). Professional identity can be divided into two types: authoritative identity andauthoritarian identity, during the interaction between teachers and students.2). Professionally, teachers position themselves as authoritative identity through the use ofself-mention such as the pronoun “I”, partial control of turn-taking right, using IRF structureflexibly, high degree of politeness, using hedges with low frequency, using boosters with highfrequency and positive attitude markers, and low modality or subjective modality. While, teachersproject themselves as authoritarian identity by means of self-mention such as the agentive “I”,total control of turn-taking, teachers’ utterance as a dominant using IRF structure, low degree ofpoliteness, using hedges with high frequency, using boosters with low frequency, negative andskeptical attitude markers, and high modality, The present study not only contributes to deepening the understanding of classroom teaching,especially to understanding the teacher-student relationship in classroom, but also helps tointerpret the teacher’s identity through discourse analysis, acquiring scientific method to analyzeand comprehend the constructing process of teachers’ professional identity from a microscopiccontext.