A Study Of Teacher Empathy Strategies In College English Classrooms-an Adaptation Perspective

The concept of empathy was originally used in German aesthetics, which was put forward by German aesthetician Robert·Vischer in 1873. The original meaning of "empathy" refers to permeating the emotion aesthetic objects in aesthetics (Zhu Guangqian,1984). Afterwards, empathy is widely applied in philosophy, psychology, inter-cultural communication, linguistics and some other fields. In Foreign Language Acquisition process, the affective factors such as attitude, motivation, empathy and other factors have been widely paid enough attention. Empathy that is regarded as one of the important affective factors and an affectional tie which links up the people's inner worlds have been widely paid enough attention by the experts and scholars naturally. Since 1990s, in the first language classes or in the second language classes, more and more scholars have focused on the effectiveness of teacher empathy strategy in classroom teaching. Through reviewing the interrelated literatures on empathy, it is found that most of the former studies are mainly carried on from the cognitive psychology angle, the behaviorist perspective and the Second Language Acquisition perspective, however, little is conducted from the adaptation theory of pragmatic perspective. The present study aims to make a pragmatic study of the use of teacher empathy strategy in college English classrooms from Verschueren's Adaptation Theory perspective, which intends to analyze teacher empathy strategy from the dynamic angle of the Adaptation Theory perspective and reveal the dynamic adaptability of teacher empathy strategy in the teaching process, so as to achieve the goal of replenishing and developing the previous studies.The present study takes the Belgian linguist Verschueren's Adaptation Theory as the theoretical framework and intends to expose the dynamic adaptability of teacher empathy strategy by taking the key notions of variability, negotiability and adaptability of the Adaptation Theory. In terms of the four angles of investigation which are the contextual correlates of adaptability, the structural objects of adaptability, the dynamics of adaptability and the salience of the adaptation processes, the present study makes a pragmatic study on teacher empathy strategy in college English classrooms. This thesis aims to answer three questions:(1) What types of empathy strategies do teachers adopt in college English classrooms? (2) What are the influences on teaching effect after teachers apply such empathy strategies? (3) What are the motivations that spur teachers to adopt such empathy strategies?In order to keep the validity and reliability of the present study, the author carried out an empirical study. Five college English teachers and 124 college students who all come from Jilin Communications Polytechnic and the author jointly take part in the empirical study. The five teachers teach English-viewing, listening and speaking course and their teaching experience locates 3 years to 8 years. The 124 students who are taught by the author come from different departments. For the purpose of acquiring the authentic and reliable data about teacher empathy strategies in college English classroom, the author randomly recorded five periods of these five teachers' English-viewing, listening and speaking courses and got about 200 minutes recording materials. With the 200 minutes recording materials, the author carried out a detailed transcription and made a systematic analysis of the transcriptions, so as to explore the general types of teacher empathy strategies in college English classrooms.At the same time, the author handed out Questionnaire One to her own students who came from Grade 2009 at the beginning of the term and handed out the Questionnaire Two at the end of the term. The first questionnaire is mainly designed about the general learning situations of the students in college English classrooms, the obstructive factors in learning course, their study attitudes toward English, their opinions about teacher empathy strategies and their expectations on teacher's empathy strategies and some other questions. By means of Questionnaire One. the author got the data about the current situations of the students in college English classrooms. After the author focused on applying the general types of teacher empathy strategies into teaching process for the whole semester, Questionnaire Two was send out to the students at the end of the semester, which still aims to test the general study situation of the students, the learning attitude of the students, whether they had conquered some obstructive factors in the learning process and some other questions. After that, the author analyzed the results of the two questionnaires by SPSS11.5. Through comparing whether the students have improved their current study situation in this term, whether the students have converted their study attitude, whether they have conquered some obstructive factors and some other datum, the influences of teacher empathy strategies on teaching effect in college English classrooms can be summarized by present study.In order to get further data, the author interviewed the five teachers and the fifteen students randomly. The interview contents are mainly about the influences of teacher empathy strategy on the teaching effect and the reasons why teachers adopt these types of empathy strategies in teaching process. Then the author analyzed the results of interviews as another data source so as to further reveal the dynamic adaptability of teacher empathy strategies.After analyzing the data which are collected from the five teachers' English-viewing, listening and speaking courses, the present study summarizes five general types of teacher empathy strategies in college English classrooms and makes a detailed analysis of these five types of teacher empathy strategies, they are:(1) Showing understandings to the students, (2) Praising and encouraging, (3) Adopting indirect ways to show ideas (4) Making an apology to students (5) Using nonverbal cues appropriately. Meanwhile, the results of the comparison of the two questionnaires indicate that these five types of teacher empathy strategies have some influences on teaching effect. The influences can be summarized as follows:(1) Reducing students' foreign language anxiety, (2) Increasing students' self-confidence, (3) Creating harmonious classroom climate. The motivations that spur teachers to adopt such empathy strategies are mainly for adapting to the dynamic factors in the teaching process, which include:(1) adaptation to the linguistic reality (such as adaptation to the improvement of students' communicative competence), (2) adaptation to the social conventions (such as adaptation to improving the classroom climate and adaptation to the students'face needs), (3) adaptation to the teachers' psychological intentions. Through describing the teachers' motivations of using these types of empathy strategies in college English classrooms, the dynamic adaptability of teacher empathy strategy has been revealed by present study.By analyzing the general using situation of teacher empathy strategy, the general types of teacher empathy strategy in college English classrooms and the motivations that spur teachers to adopt such empathy strategies have been discussed in present study. The present study hopes it can provide more and more available and practical empathy strategies to the college teachers, heighten the teachers' awareness of adaptability when they adopt empathy strategies, and make the teachers apply these types of empathy strategies correctly in the teaching process, so as to further arouse the learning interests of the students, improve the teaching effects and increase the quality of teaching.