A Study On Pragmatic Identity Construction Of English Teachers In Rural Primary School Of Miao Minority Area

With the deepening of education reform,the topic of teacher identity construction has become a hot issue of second or foreign language teaching research.Admittedly,the effective construction of teachers? identities plays an important role in class.For primary school students in the Miao minority area,the English subject is new and difficult compared to other courses.Due to the special geographical location and less exposure to foreign cultures,the Miao students hardly have any knowledge of English and usually feel nervous or anxious in learning it.To address these problems,the practice of multimodal discourse and multivariate teachers? identities may help minority students reduce their anxiety and burden in learning English language.Based on this recognition,the research in this thesis makes an attempt to study the construction of English teachers? identities of rural elementary school in the Miao minority area.The research took Long Yin Ethnic Primary School in Pu?an County,Qianxinan Buyi Miao Autonomous Prefecture,Guizhou Province as a case study,having conducted a four-month investigation of classroom observation,interview and class audio recording.At the same time,guided by multimodal discourse analysis and linguistic adaptation theory,the authors compiled and analyzed the research data to study the construction of elementary school English teachers’ discourse identities in the Miao minority area,aiming to answer the following three questions.1.What forms of multimodality are used by elementary school English teachers in the Miao minority area in classroom teaching?2.What teacher identities are constructed by the application of multimodality in classroom teaching?3.What are the motivations for the construction of multimodal teacher identities in the Miao minority area?(How do multimodal constructs of teachers’ multiple identities respond to the communicative contexts of teaching and learning?)After the investigation,the results and findings of the study are as follows:1.Primary school English teachers in Miao minority area do use rich multimodal resources in their class which include verbal and nonverbal discourses such as bilingual,prosodic features,gestures and facial expressions.2.The use of multimodal discourse in teaching English in Miao primary school schools to construct multiple teacher identities,such as authoritative identity,peer identity,encouraging identity,and affinity identity.3.Primary school teachers? use of multimodal discourses and multivariate teachers? identities in their English class in the Miao minority area is to meet the communicative needs for the purpose of effective teaching.According to linguistic adaptation theory,the construction of multivariate teachers? identities in English teaching could be considered as an adaptation to the physical,social and mental contexts of each class for accomplishing teaching tasks and achieving teaching goals.The author thinks that the study may provide some implications or enlightements for the practice and research of primary school English teaching,particularly the practical teaching of primary school English in ethnic minority areas.