A Research On English Teachers’ Evaluative Speeches In Class From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Evaluation is an important part of the English curriculum. Students can experience progress and success continually through the way of assessment during the English learning process. It makes them form self-awareness, build up self-esteem, and adjust learning strategies. Also it can promote the all-round development of students’ comprehensive ability in using language. Meanwhile, evaluation enables English teachers to get feedback in teaching and to have a reflection and adjustment to their teaching behaviors, so as to constantly improve the level of education and teaching. However, some teachers pay more attention to teaching design and implementation than to their evaluative speeches. Thus the author decided to make an in-depth study on the evaluative speeches in English class.This study uses the classroom observation, speech analysis, data analysis and other research methods. It tries to know the current phenomenon of evaluative speeches in English class, to find the problems often appearing in evaluative speeches, to analyze the causes of the problems, and to put forward some feasible suggestions in terms of solution. In this study, videos of 10 different English classes from elementary schools to universities were downloaded from the websites and transcripts of these 10 lessons were analyzed in the light of Cooperative Principle. The author found that sometimes teachers may violate the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle to evaluate students’ performance in class in order to achieve better teaching effects. Also the author discovered that the direct evaluation was more excessively used than the indirect evaluation; assessment of instructive speeches is more highly used in the form of correction, encouragement and praise and some other features. This observation suggested that the evaluative speeches in English class had those problems, such as fewer evaluative speeches, more negative evaluative speeches and the lack of differences in teachers’ evaluative speeches.According to the problems appearing in the evaluative speeches in English class and taking care of students’ needs in learning, the author puts forward some feasible suggestions and strategies to improve the evaluative speeches in English class. On the one hand, teachers should understand the value and functions of evaluative speeches in the classroom. They should realize the impact of classroom comments on students and try to master the functions of different assessments and evaluative strategies. On the other hand, schools should strengthen the relevant teacher professional training, improve their professional quality and attach great importance to cultivating their speech ability in class.