A Study On Identity Construction Of Junior High School Students?Based On English Classroom Discursive Interactions

The relationship between discourse and identity has been the hot topic of sociolinguistic research in recent years.The present study explores discourse and identity construction in a range of classroom contexts.Drawing on a second-year English class of junior high school in Beijing as the interactional setting,the study adopted research methods such as: observation,interview,questionnaire,SPSS,and carried out a systematic conversation analysis.It was conducted to answer the following two research questions:1)What are the characteristics of the junior high school students' English classroom conversations? And what identities do they construct in their discursive interactions?2)What factors may contribute to their identity construction in English classroom discursive interactions?Significantly different characteristics and dynamic changes of students' classroom conversations were observed in twelve English lectures in three semesters.The results can be summed up as follows: three boys had high achievement in English learning but took the smallest number of turns,interruptions and overlaps in classroom.They constructed their identities as quiet curve-wreckers.From a dynamic perspective,they took fewer and fewer turns gradually in the three observed semesters.Another four boys had relatively low achievement in the study but they took their special strategies to survive in turn spaces.Their numbers of turns,interruptions,and overlaps fluctuated with the management of teachers.They established the images of talkative underachievers.Meanwhile,four girls took the largest number of turns and repairs.Their number of the turns was relatively stable,which shows their dominant position throughout the study.They constructed their identities of toughgirls.Besides the characteristics of their conversations,the factors that affected the identity construction were tested on SPSS.According to the output of Multiple Regression,one of the contributing factors?position?played the most important role in participants' identity construction,which reflected the power supremeness in English lectures.