English Classroom Discourse Studies: A 10-Year Retrospective Analysis (2015-2024)

Based on 32 articles from core foreign language journals indexed in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) between 2015 and 2024, this study systematically reviews the decade-long progress of English classroom discourse research in China. The findings reveal a shift in research themes from traditional interactional structure analyses to multidimensional explorations, including the reconstruction of dynamic dialogue networks, technology-driven innovation, multimodal synergy mechanisms, teacher development pathways, and an ecological research shift. Methodologically, interdisciplinary integration has emerged as a trend, with technological applications (e.g., corpus analysis and large language model interventions) and multimodal collaboration (from modal superposition to meaning co-construction) becoming research hotspots. The practical knowledge attributes of teacher discourse and its feedback value for professional development have gained increasing attention. Despite notable achievements, current research still faces challenges such as insufficient thematic depth, weak methodological systematization, and a disconnect between theory and practice. Future studies should integrate multidisciplinary theories, construct localized analytical frameworks, enhance the scale and longitudinal depth of empirical research, and explore a “research-teaching-learning” collaborative ecosystem to advance classroom discourse studies from phenomenon interpretation to practice transformation, thereby contributing to the systematic improvement of foreign language education quality.