Expectations regarding the role and competences of teachers in Finnish comprehensive schools are currently subjected to changes that derive both from societal changes affecting schoolwork and top-down official requirements. Linguistic research can shed light on how these competence development expectations and requirements are communicated, how teachers and their supervisors negotiate these goals, and how teachers themselves talk about their development as a teacher.
In this paper, I explore the ways in which this kind of multidimensional phenomenon can be researched. The focus is on how teachers themselves discursively construct and present their professional development and identify and define factors affecting it. More specifically, I scrutinize which evaluative expressions teachers use when talking about their competences and growing as a teacher.
The theoretical framework of my research is Critical Discourse Analysis. My main method is linguistic text analysis and I use Martin and White's Evaluation Theory in categorizing my semi-structured interview data. (The production of this data set is work in progress). By doing so, I will show how, and for what purposes, teachers use evaluative expressions. The analysis reveals how the evaluative language participates in constructing different discourses in the school context.
As a result, I will show how the ideals of being a teacher are linguistically constructed and how linguistics can offer a relevant way of addressing the topic of professional development. By increasing understanding of what teachers think about their own competences and how they deal with the change, this research can give us a wider perspective on the discourses of professional development.
This paper is based on the first article of my article-based dissertation which examines from a linguistic point of view the changing teacherhood and how it is reflected in teachers' narratives of professional identity development.
MARTIN, J. R. & WHITE, P. R. R. 2005. The language of evaluation. Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
