Construal of the Contemporary: A Lexico-Grammatical Analysis of Stance and Voice in EFL Student Teacher Reflections on Language Teaching
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Abstract
Amid the abundance of teacher cognition scholarship, how student teachers linguistically construct their understanding of contemporary language teaching remains largely overlooked. Drawing on a lexico-grammatical profiling approach, this study explored stance, modality, and attribution as linguistic indicators of professional voice from the perspective of corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The research employed LancsBox X on a corpus of reflective essays written by 52 Ukrainian EFL student teachers to analyze keywords, functional stance markers, 3-grams, collocation patterns, and concordance lines. The findings epitomize a discourse of epistemic modesty, positive affect, and a balance of self-attribution and generalized attribution. Hedges predominated over boosters, commensurate with cautious engagement with professional knowledge, while “should” emerged as a principal marker of acceptance of disciplinary norms. Collocational networks further illustrate participants’ identification with learner-centered and context-sensitive language pedagogy, evincing an orientation toward principled eclecticism. Ultimately, this study shows that language not only reflects teacher cognitions but also provides a lens through which they can be examined.
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