A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Teacher Identity Construction In High School English Classroom

The study of teacher identity in the west began in the 1950 s and sprung up in the1980 s,and the heat has not subsided.In China,however,the study of teacher identity has mostly appeared in this century,which is a new trend in the field of Applied Linguistics in the last decade,and thus its importance can be seen clearly.Researchers either employ macro-educational narrative methods,or focus on micro-teaching events,the amount of teacher talk,the length of the turn,adopting questionnaires,interviews,and other perspectives to deepen our understanding of teacher identity.A vast literature as there is,few start with the classroom discourse itself,analyze the teacher identity construction process and unmask the macro factors behind it.Critical discourse analysis expects to crystallize the relationship between language,power and ideology via making clear the linguistic representation of sociocultural factors and ideology.Fairclough thus brings up three dimensions of critical discourse analysis: describing the formal characteristics of text,interpreting the relationship between text and interaction,and explaining the relationship between interaction and social context.In this sense,the theory of critical discourse analysis is in line with the two-way consideration of teacher identity construction from micro to macro.Consequently,the present study is mainly based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional analysis framework,under which Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is employed as an analytical tool to investigate the transitivity,modality and theme of classroom discourse transcription materials on the stage of description and interpretation;On explanatory stage,it mainly probes into the relationship between the micro discourse and the sociocultural context,ideology,power and control.Up to now,the study mainly answers three questions below:(1)what types of teachers’ identities are constructed in high school English classroom?(2)how these identities are constructed through teachers’ choices of discourse resources?(3)What are the relationships between macrofactors such as ideology,sociocultural context and classroom discourse which contributes to the construction of teacher identity?The results indicate that high school English teachers construct three types of identities through different discourse representation strategies in the classroom context.Specifically,teachers construct authoritative identity by massing material process verbs,distinguishing participants I and You,and naturalizing participants We,etc.;teachers frequently employ the median-and low-value finite modal operators in modality and modulization expressions to construct the amiable identity;teachers resort to marked thematic imperatives,marked thematic declaratives denoting time,and the continuous patterns of thematic progression to construct guiding identity.By further exploring the power relations in the classroom,it is believed that there exists a dialectical relationship between classroom discourse and sociocultural factors,which enables them to contain each other and interact mutually.Ideology permeates classroom discourse and endows teachers with the legitimacy of discourse hegemony in the classroom through sociocultural factors.