Linguistics Strategy of Teacher Representation Through Views and Languages of Government Officials in Discourse of Thai Daily Newspapers

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the association between the representation of teachers and the strategy in a discourse context through linguistic strategies in the discourse of a Thai daily newspaper. In this qualitative research, documentary research and a critical discourse analysis framework of Fairclough (1995) were utilized to collect and analyze the data. The data consists of 812 news, which presented teachers’ news since 1st January, 2020–31st December, 2020.

The findings reveal that most Thai government officials express their views through daily newspapers, categorizing teachers into two perspectives, which represent teachers as people who have negative and inappropriate behavior. In addition, there are four sub-representations that could be used to support the overnment officials' views mentioned; (1) teachers who are violent with their students; (2) teachers who have low proficiency; (3) teachers who are associated with illegal objects; and (4) teachers who are heavily burdened with debt. On the other hand, teachers might be presented in a positive perspective as teachers behaving in accordance with social expectations. There are three sub-representations of teachers that could be employed to support the main positive perspective of teachers, which including that a teacher as a person who dedicated themselves to students and society; a teacher who is society’s expectation that can move society forward; and a teacher who has an honorable career. The representation of teachers had been presented through three linguistic strategies including; (1) lexical strategy (e.g., referencing and using word choice to imply the meaning); (2) structural strategy (e.g., passive voice); and (3) pragmatic strategy (e.g., modality and presupposition). According to government officials' views and language, it was found that they attempted to propose a negative representation of teachers more than a positive one, so that could affect the population’s attitudes. Moreover, they might be the cause of current situations, for example, the student protest, teacher development policy, and teacher debt resolution policy. These examples could decrease people's belief in teachers.