Facework In The Classroom Analysis

This chapter examines the complexity of teacher identity construction through some of the discursive processes of face negotiation between the teachers and students in the classroom. More specifically, drawing from the data, this chapter analyses how the teachers by participating in facework can simultaneously construct and negotiate their professional identities. The analysis shows examples of situations when the teachers’ face and identities are maintained and strengthened, as well as when the teachers’ face and identities are challenged and contested by the students. In each of these circumstances, by examining some of these discursive ways of facework, a variety of teachers’ identities are also drawn from such processes.

6.1. The reinforcement

Regardless of the different categorization of teachers’ task, it is argued that the ways these tasks are carried out are not always straightforward and very often vary from teacher to teacher. More importantly, these frequent teachers’ tasks involve discursive processes of teachers managing face as well as negotiating their professional identities. The following examples are selected to illustrate how facework in the classrooms can easily become a vulnerable matter and can be done with quite different approaches.

The first extract takes place after a student’s presentation on the topic ‘your daily routine’. What is particular interesting about this extract is the way teacher constructing her feedback and how the feedback is conveyed to the student after the presentation. Particularly, the feedback is delayed and substituted with an additional turn where the teacher does facework before moving onto her evaluation of the student’s

This first example shows how the facework is negotiated between participants where both of the teacher and the student’s face and identities are maintained and reinforced. Extract 2 also illustrates how teacher’s face and identities as an expert are maintained; yet in a rather different approach.

Extract 2 takes place during the class’s noughts and crosses game where the students are divided into two groups (group A and B) of 5 to 6 students. In order to earn their noughts and crosses in the game, each team has to take turn and give a correct answer to the teacher’s questions. Upon this extract, group A was requested to sing an English song and S1 self-nominated to fulfil the task. The extract captures the conversation between the teacher and S1 following up his singing in previous turns where S1 is asked to further describe the content of the