SYNTACTIC ASPECTS OF THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER’S SPEECH: A CASE OF LINGUISTIC PROFESSIONAL PROFILING

Abstract

The article examines the issue of linguistic profiling of individuals through the lens of their career and language competence. The author aims to identify a set of characteristic speech markers typical of the real and virtual English language teachers and contrasts the results obtained. Thus, the present study is methodologically based on the original English-language novels where the English language teachers are depicted as characters, on the one hand, and on a field experiment conducted personally by the author and involving two Ukraine-originating teachers of English from Odesa lyceums. Having analysed the notions of professional image and speech portrait, the author outlines the English language teacher’s speech status in society in general and proves them to be representatives of the elite social stratum. The study has an uncontestable scientific novelty since it has revealed that whilst the real teachers of English from Ukraine and their colleagues described in the original English-language novels demonstrate similar syntactic sentence types in verbal communication, the differences are also quite striking and possibly rooted in the national mentality. Thus, a conclusion has been made that virtual English teachers prefer encoding their information in complicated sentences, using syntactic complexes, whereas the real teachers of English from Ukraine, unfortunately, neglect this way of minimizing speech efforts, and employ more complex and composite sentences instead. Another interesting discovery is the virtual teachers’ tendency to ask several tag-questions in a row, which can be seen as a way of verbal suggestion to a certain answer by the interlocutor. Mistakes being far from typical in the speech of both groups, the Ukrainian teachers of English may still deviate from the traditional rules of word order and overload the linear length of their sentences. Regarding the perspectives of the study, the author plans to contrast the speech of virtual English teachers with that of real English teachers from the English-speaking countries, both male and female, and to add the levels of phonetics and vocabulary to the scope of analysis.