The Discursive Construction Of Professor Identity In China

Along with the remarkable change of contemporary Chinese social values and the rapid popularization of online social networking services,teacher image in Chinese traditional social structure has been rerepresented.Despite large numbers of positive media reports about teachers’ collective identity,teachers’ positive stereotype by the public mind is more or less distorted because of uneven information distribution and knowledge disequilibrium.As a space where discourse,power and knowledge interweave,media,which constructs and reflects social life,constitutes an important carrier of collective identity,and determine the dissemination content and mode of group image.In traditional media,although news reports claim they are objective and impartial,the publication of news content relies on the ideology of press agency and journalists.Weibo(microblog),a newly rising social media,is an important medium to learn about public opinions and social reality.Nevertheless,it is blamed for the lack of objectivity and facticity so as to have positive and negative information in it.Newspaper media and Weibo complement and distinguish each other in both audience and the communication content.Under the guidance of Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Framework and Koller’s Collective Identity Analysis Level in discourse,the present study attempts to perform a comparative investigation into the discursive construction of professor collective identity in traditional print media and social media in China represented by People’s Daily and Sina Microblog.The analyses of texts at the micro-level,discursive strategies at the meso-level,and social practice at the macro-level suggest that: Firstly,despite difference in terms of sicoal function,both People’s Daily and Sina Microblog construct positive collective identity through professor occupational identity and social identity.Secondly,two media both employ positive stereotype to discurisvely construct professor’s positive collective identity although Sina Microblog adopts more negative stereotypes than People’s Daily.Last,national policy environment and social tradition of respecting teachers in China are major social factors to shape professor’s positive collective identity.The governmental investment in higher education has provided material guarantee for the realization of the social function of professors.The cultural heritage of respecting teachers and valuing education generates public’s positive stereotype of professor social group.