A Study On Conversational Identity Construction Of Novice English Teachers In Junior Middle School

Conversational identity refers to the online identity dynamically constructed by conversation participants,who use different levels of language resources during interactive communication.The construction of conversational identity refers to the pragmatic phenomenon that the conversation participants use different identities to communicate according to the needs of communication.In recent years,the researches on the construction of teachers’ identity have gradually increased,but little attention has been paid to novice teachers who are in the key stage of identity construction,much less the studies that explore the construction of novice teachers’ identity in combination with the theory of conversational identity.Therefore,based on the theory of conversational identity and the identity identification path,the thesis summarizes the types and frequencies of conversational identity,analyzes the approaches and speech representations of five novice teachers’ identity construction,then makes some suggestions on the identity construction of novice teachers.This study followed five novice junior high school English teachers(three females and two males)for three months.According to the curriculum arrangement of different teachers,the author follows each teacher 12 class hours,each class hour is 40 minutes,it’s totally about2400 minutes classroom recorded data.The thesis uses quantitative and qualitative methods to solve three research questions:(1)What identity types do novice teachers construct in the classroom?(2)What are the approaches and speech representations of novice teachers’ conversational identity construction?(3)What methods can be used to construct novice teachers’ conversational identity?The thesis reveals:(1)Conversational identity includes discourse identity,situated identity and transportable identity,discourse identity is a part of the moment-by-moment organization of interaction,as a basic identity,it accounts for a high proportion in classroom.Situated identity has institutional characteristics,including “teacher” and “partner” situated identity.Transportable identity is changeable potential identity and integrates into situated identity.Transportable identity varies according to teachers’ personal experience.(2)The main approaches to novice teachers’ situated identity construction include teachers intervene in conversation repair actively and passively.The speech representation of situated identity mainly includes the propositional content such as knowledge explanation,error correction,communication maintenance,the discourse forms such as appellation,boosters,interrogative sentence,imperative sentence,declarative sentence.The main approaches to transportable identity construction are teachers construct transportable identities actively and teachers construct transportable identities in compliance with students’ discourse.As for the speech representation of transportable identity,teachers usually talk about their personal experience.In terms of discourse forms,transportable identities are mainly constructed in identifiers,person deixis and reference questions.(3)“Questioner” discourse identity accounts for a high frequency,“questioning” is a common means in class,while novice teachers tend to use positive and negative questions,which may make students get insufficient practice,so they can appropriately enrich questioning methods;Novice teacher construct situated identity by“instant active repair”,which may interrupt the turn and affect students’ oral expression.Therefore,novice teachers can appropriately reduce the frequency of instant active repair;Transportable identity is the key to the diversity and dynamics of classroom conversation,while the frequencies are relatively low.Novice teachers can integrate more reference questions and focus on students’ discourse,which can help them construct appropriate transportable identity.The thesis promotes the development of conversational identity research,it focuses on the novice teachers’ identities,hoping to provide some enlightenment for novice teachers to increase the diversity and dynamics of the class based on the orderly management.