Pragmatic Empathy And Oral English Teaching In Junior Middle School

Empathy, especially pragmatic empathy can’t be separated in foreign language learning.In daily language communication, it requires to use pragmatic empathy between the twoparties of communication to realize a successful intercultural communication, especially anEnglish learner should put more emphasis on other’s position and understand other’slinguistic habit.This study is also based on the author’s own ten years’ practice as an English teacher in ajunior middle school. The teaching practice provides the author with a chance to have anapproaching into the position of pragmatic teaching at the point of middle schools. The aimof this study is to study the strategies and functions of teacher talk in junior middle schoolsfrom a pragmatic point of view, and find the ways to improve the effectiveness of teacher talkfor English teachers in junior high schools, and improve the teaching efficiency. The thesisaims to solve three problems:(1)Is the employment of pragmatic empathy in Englishteaching effective in improvement of the middle-school students’ oral English ability?(2) Isthe pragmatic empathy-oriented classroom oral English teaching beneficial to themiddle-school students in developing their overall language proficiency?(3) Is the pragmaticempathy helpful to middle-school students’ in the use of the English language communicationin everyday life? In order to solve the three questions, the author elaborates the backgroundof the thesis and reviews the basic theory and the four principles of empathy, which includesmaxim of equality, rationality, politeness and information, to serve as the guiding line of thispaper and provide a referencing foundation to the empirical research and offer a basedmaterial for the students’ questionnaire and interview doing.Through making an empirical survey,this thesis aims to investigate the effectiveness ofthe pragmatic empathy within80junior school students selected to participate in the test.After the test, the author uses a comparative method to discuss the differences betweenpretest and posttest result in order to explore the differences in teaching mode on basis ofpragmatic empathy strategy and traditional teaching mode. The test method is based on twocopies of questionnaire and an interview after test, which will make a qualitative and quantitative analysis in the end. By referring the experimental result, the author makes aconclusion that the oral English teaching mode based on the strategy of pragmatic empathyhelps to improve junior school students’ English communicative competence andcomprehensive ability.