Self-Representation of Filipino Teachers and Korean Learners of English in Online Classes

With an exhaustive survey of published studies, we found that no attempts have been made to analyze classroom talks between Filipino teachers and Korean students of English in online ESL classes. The reason may be attributed to the arduous labor of transcribing and analyzing the data both macro- and microscopically. This lacuna may have provided teachers and students a poor understanding of the features of talk of both interlocutors in an online modality. For this study, we looked at the way Filipino teachers and Korean students of English represented themselves using the first-person pronoun "I" (1PP) through the lens of transitivity processes via Systemic Functional Linguistics. The transcribed data were culled through transitivity concordancing analysis of "I" social actors from five 20- minute audio-recorded classes (1 hour and 40 minutes), which were secured from a leading online academy in Metro Manila. An interesting result disclosed that the teachers and the students dominantly used mental processes when self-representing. Material and relational processes are traditionally known as the default processes based on M.A.K. Halliday's (1985) framework. At a comparative level, they tended to share the same means of self-representing at the level of material, mental and relational process, but different in terms of verbal processes. Overall, the identical pattern of self-representation may be an indication of their attempts to mitigate the psychological and communications space called 'transactional distance' in an online ESL education. We offer limitations, recommendations, and implications toward the end of the paper.