Uncovering English Language Tutor Identities in Kazakhstan: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Online Tutoring Advertisements

Abstract

Due to the recent expansion of fee-based private tutoring (PT), particularly English private tutoring (EPT), tutors increasingly find themselves in need of strategically promoting their services to attract prospective students. Nowadays, owing to the prevalence of the Internet and technology, one of the most common ways that they do so is by posting their advertisements on online tutoring platforms. These advertisements serve as the sites for displaying tutors’ desired identities using the multimodal affordances of linguistic and visual semiotic resources. Despite the popularity of research exploring English language tutor identities across different contexts, most studies have done so through tutors’ personal narratives. In international literature, little attention has been given to understanding how tutors construct and project their desired identities multimodally in digital spaces such as online advertisements. In Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, such studies are entirely absent. Therefore, this study sought to address this gap by examining the multimodal construction of English language tutor identities in Kazakhstan. Guided by the theoretical framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this study adopts Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) and Visual Grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) to analyze 20 advertisements belonging to four different groups of English language tutors, namely English language teachers, university students, other professionals, and foreigners, on one popular online tutoring platform. The analysis explored what identities these four different groups of English language tutors construct and how these identities are represented at linguistic and visual levels. The findings reveal that each tutor group constructs a distinct identity characteristic to that group, but there is also one ubiquitous identity shared by all tutors regardless of the group. Tutors strategically use and combine specific linguistic and visual semiotic resources to present the identities that would appeal to the audience. Each of these identities was found to reflect broader EPT and social discourses, including mainstream schooling, neoliberalism, native speakerism, and English as symbolic and social capital. I conclude by discussing implications for fostering more critical and ethical identity construction practices among English language tutors in online advertising, and by proposing avenues for future research.