An Analysis of College English Teachers’ Classroom Discourse in AI-Empowered Teaching Context——A Case Study of Excellent Teaching Examples from FLTRP Star Teacher Contest
Teacher discourse is not only a medium for knowledge transmission but also an important tool for constructing classroom interpersonal relationships. In the context of AI-empowered foreign language teaching, this paper analyzes the classroom discourse of three award-winning teachers from the 2025 FLTRP Star Teacher Contest from the perspectives of mood and modality within Halliday’s interpersonal function theory.The study finds that the three teachers share common features in their use of the mood system: they are adept at using well-structured interrogative mood to guide students‘thinking, employ the first-person plural “we” to shorten the distance between teacher and students, and politely handle the imperative mood to mitigate the directness of instructions. In terms of the modality system, median and low modal value words appear frequently, while high modal value words are used cautiously and point to objective requirements, reflecting a consultative teacher-student relationship. These discourse strategies collectively construct an equal and open classroom interpersonal atmosphere. This study reveals the interpersonal functional characteristics of excellent teachers’ classroom discourse in AI-empowered teaching contexts and provides useful references for pre-service English teachers, particularly English education majors, to reflect on and optimize their own discourse practices.