The Realization Of "Correcting" In Chinese Classrooms

Correcting is frequently used in our daily life. However, there have been few studies addressing this issue. How do Chinese college students realize such a speech act? What are the politeness formulas employed in their correcting? The questions still remain unsolved, thus are the aims of this study.It was hypothesized that Chinese college students follow certain patterns and employ certain politeness formulas in performing the speech act of correcting. In order to elicit data from the students, 60 undergraduates, 34 females and 26 males, were randomly selected, varying from grade one to grade four, in the College of Foreign Studies of GuangXi Normal University, to write down their response in Chinese in three situations.In situation 1, where the students role-play the professor to correct the students, it was found that the subjects prefer to point out the occurrence of the mistake, instead of correcting directly. This pattern using "No correction" is different from the pattern using " positive remarkï¹¢[but]ï¹¢correction" shared by majority of Americans and Japanese, as was observed by Beebe and Takahashi (1993).In situation 2 , where students correct professors, the subjects correct directly, but they employed various politeness devices.In situation 3, where students correct students, the subjects correct directly and use less politeness devices..The study found that Chinese subjects in situation 1 prefer to use positive remarks to preface the correction. In situation 2, Chinese students enhance the politeness and soften the face-threatening by way of employing various politeness devices at a time in one response. In situation 3, subjects employed less politeness devices to correct the mistake directly. These findings suggest that the theory of "face" restated by Brown & Levinson does exist in the performance of correcting. And it is also found that the percentage of the politeness devices used in situation 2 is the highest than politeness devices used in the rest of two situations, also is highest than Americans and Japanese used according to Beebe & Takahashi (1993). These findings show Chinese college students shift their politeness device according to different people in different status and they are the most conscious of social status. The findings of this study might help both foreign language teachers and foreign languagelearners to diminish the breakdowns of cross-culture communication when performing correcting. However, this study is confined to classroom correcting, and it would be interesting in the future to investigate how people out of classroom perform "correcting", and if they also follow our models and politeness devices.