A Study Of Teacher Talk In College English Teaching From Politeness Strategies Perspective

Teacher talk is not only the medium of information transfer. It is also a pattern for English learners to imitate. It attracts researchers'great attention in language teaching classroom. In the west, a lot of researchers have paid great attention on the importance of teacher talk in SLL. Since 1970s, researchers have started to concentrate on teacher talk. Many researchers have done experimental studies about teacher talk. However, most of the studies have emphasized on the linguistic modifications that generalize and classify teacher talk. In China, teacher talk has always been paid great attention to in English classroom. In general, only a few are systematic and comprehensive researches on teacher talk, and a majority is introductions to the studies conducted abroad. However, few of researches empirically and systematically concentrate on teacher talk in EFL classroom. Politeness is a character and strategy of teachers' language. In this thesis, I try to investigate the teacher talk in college English teaching from politeness strategies perspective and the students'reactions to teacher's politeness strategy.This research bases on Brown& Levinson's face-saving politeness theory. There are also some other theories mentioned in this thesis, such as politeness and indirectness, politeness and context. We chose subjects from college school including forty English teachers and one hundred students. The study of this thesis gave us a new angle of view on teacher talk. All the data were collected from the classroom observation by audio-recording and interviewed by questionnaires. We used Blum-Kulka's three levels of directness to analyze these data.The following are the results of analysis and discussions.(1) During the classroom interaction, the politeness strategies can be properly used by most of the English teachers.(2)Because of the special characters of English class , teachers will use the direct strategy more frequently.(3)Most of English teachers realized the importance of politeness strategies . So they try their best to create a relaxing and harmonious classroom atmosphere to achieve their expected teaching objectives.