A Study On Metadiscourse Construction Of Pragmatic Identity Of High School English Teachers In Reading Class From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As a significant type of discursive practice in class,teacher’s classroom metadiscourse can assist teachers in the construction of multiple pragmatic identities in class,thereby achieving different teaching effects.However,the number of research on the construction of teachers’ classroom pragmatic identity based on classroom metadiscourse is limited.With the theoretical foundation of Verschueren’s(1999)adaptation theory,this study examined the discourse of high school English teachers in reading class based on Hyland’s(2005)interpersonal model of metadiscourse and explored the characteristics of their metadiscourse use,the types of pragmatic identities they constructed and the reasons for constructing these pragmatic identities.Five high school English teachers who participated in the 11 th National High School English Classroom Teaching Observation Class were selected as the subjects of this study.The discourse of these five teachers’ reading classes were transcribed and manually proofread.The teacher metadiscourse was then identified and annotated manually.This study aims to answer the following three questions: 1.What types of metadiscourse are used by high school English teachers in reading class? How frequently are they used? 2.What teacher pragmatic identities are constructed by these metadiscourse markers? 3.Why do high school English teachers construct these teacher pragmatic identities?This study finds that: 1.High school English teachers employ both interactive and interactional metadiscourse in reading class;However,the frequencies of them are different.Interactive metadiscourse appears less frequently than interactional metadiscourse.Among the interactive metadiscourse,in descending order of frequency and proportion of occurrence,frame markers,transitional markers,endophoric markers,code glosses and evidentials are found.Among the interactive metadiscourse,in descending order of frequency and proportion of occurrence,are engagement markers,attitude markers,self mentions,hedges and boosters.Second,high school English teachers mainly construct four types of pragmatic identities through metadiscourse in reading class: authoritative,benign,peer,and modest teacher identities.Third,high school English teachers construct different pragmatic identities in reading class to adapt to the physical,social,and mental worlds.Based on the above findings,suggestions are offered for high school English teachers in reading class to construct pragmatic identities through the use of appropriate metadiscourse to adapt to different contexts.