Classroom Discourse and the Construction of Learner and Teacher Identities
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CLASSROOM DISCOURSE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF LEARNER AND TEACHER IDENTITIES
INTRODUCTION
Classroom discourse refers to contextualized or situated language use in classrooms, as specific interactional contexts, that reflects cultural and social practices. Interest in classroom discourse analysis grows with an enhanced understanding of the mediating role of talk in learning as a high-level mental activity (see review by Green and Dixon, Classroom Interaction, Situated Learning, Volume 3). From a sociocultural point of view, a person’s speech is a marker of identity. The interweaving relationship between identity and contextualized use of language in the classroom has been brought to our attention by poststructuralist and social constructivist researchers, who view classrooms as a social and cultural space where power politics and ideological conflicts are in constant interplay (e.g. Kumaravadivelu, 1999). An understanding of how such politics and conflicts come into being requires an understanding of teachers’ and students’ identities as a dynamic, (re) negotiable, and powerful factor in the process of interaction, which, in turn, affects ways of teaching and learning. In this review, I shall identify major developments and themes in classroom discourse analysis pertaining to teachers’ and students’ identity construction, and show how these contribute to our understanding of teaching and learning. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
In its most basic form, identity refers to our sense of self, or who we are. Since birth, every person is subject to a set of ‘ascribed’ identities usually associated with biological referents. For example, on our identity cards and passports, there is information about our nationality and/ or ethnic origin, age generation and gender. All these forms of identities are given to us, and enable us, as we move along different social planes, to perceive how we are the same, or different, from ‘others’. In the field of applied linguistics, different disciplines proffer different ways of talking about identity, often without agreement about their distinctive features. Some terms which are commonly used to express different aspects of the concept of identity include ‘self’, ‘role’, ‘positioning’, ‘subject position’, ‘subjectivity’. Basically, ‘self’ is associated M. Martin-Jones, A. M. de Mejia and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Discourse and Education, 121–134. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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with an individual’s feeling, whereas ‘role’ highlights the more static, formal and ritualistic aspect of identity. Subject positions/subjectivity, on the other hand, imply agency, conscious action and authorship (see related review on Freeman Field, Identity, Community and Power in Bilingual Education, Volume 5). In the following paragraphs, I will discuss how the concept of teachers’ and students’ identity was presented in some of the early developments of classroom discourse analysis. Despite its weaknesses, Flande
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