Investigating Pre-service English Teachers' Identity Construction Using Multimodal Discourse Analysis

The study of teacher identity has been booming since it was proposed in the last century, and the popularity has not subsided. Some scholars explored teacher identity from the macroscopic perspective using educational narrative and critical discourse analysis, while others explored it with micro-conversational analysis. Among the previous research, few studies focused on the process of pre-service teachers’ identity construction with multimodal discourse analysis. Adopting multimodality design framework for identity construction, this multi-case study of two student teachers examined four dimensions of teacher identity including framing, selection, foregrounding and arrangement. The results indicated a variety of differences in the types of teacher identities which two student teachers constructed. Student teacher A was more inclined to construct authoritative and knowledgeable teacher identity, while student teacher B constructed guiding and amiable teacher identity. It was found that different student teacher identities had different effects on classroom teaching. On the one hand, constructing teachers’ authority too much resulted in less teacher-student interaction and low student participation in the classroom. On the other hand, building an excessively intimate relationship between teacher and students led to poor classroom discipline.