A Study On Pragmatic Empathy Of English Classroom Teacher Talk From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

“Empathy” has been a hot topic in the fields of Aesthetics,Psychology.In recent years,the study of “empathy” has shown a pragmatic turn.He Ziran(1991)firstly introduced the empathy study into the field of pragmatics and proposed the concept of pragmatic empathy.Meanwhile he studied the pragmatic empathy from the perspective of pragma-linguistics and socialpragmatics.Pragmatic empathy and foreign language teaching are also inextricable.In foreign language classroom teaching,the communicative interaction between teachers and students depends largely on the empathy of teacher talk.The realization of pragmatic empathy can shorten the psychological distance between teachers and students and create a harmonious and relaxed teaching atmosphere.Exploring the pragmatic empathy of teacher talk from linguistics can not only further enrich the system of teacher talk,but also broaden the research objects of pragmatic empathy.Therefore,in view of the above situation and research needs,this study explores pragmatic empathy in teacher talk from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.The purpose of this study is to explore the realization forms,motivations and functions of pragmatic empathy in teacher talk as well as the practical effects of pragmatic empathic discourse-oriented English teaching,which aims to answer three major questions:(1)What are the main forms used to realize the pragmatic empathy in teacher talk?(2)From the perspective of Adaptation Theory,what are the motivations and functions of pragmatic empathy used in teacher talk?(3)What are the application effects of the pragmatic empathic discourse-oriented English teaching model for students’ English learning?The thesis uses English teacher videos from a website called teaching videos as the source of corpus,40 classroom discourse of middle school English teachers are collected as research corpus.Inspired by Huang Xianghui(2008)and Fu Weijie(2019)et al’ s classification of pragmatic empathy realization forms,the study counts the types and frequencies of pragmatic empathy realization forms in teacher talk,analyzing the motivations and functions of the realization forms based on theoretical framework of adaptation theory.After that,in order to explore the application effects of pragmatic empathic teacher talk,the researcher takes two classes of Grade Eight in middle school as the teaching experimental sample and meanwhile conducts corresponding analysis and discussion on the data.Through the research,this thesis draws the following conclusions:(1)It is found that there are four realization forms with high frequency used in teacher talk: personal deixis,modal verbs,compliments and hedges,which play an important role in teaching.(2)From the perspective of Adaptation Theory,the motivations for teachers to make use of pragmatic empathy are to adapt to communicative contextual factors,teacher always try to start their teaching from students’ point of view,adapting to students’ emotions of mental world constantly and social identity and social rules of the social world,adapting to the time and space factors of the physical world in which students and teachers live.What’s more,through the analysis of corpus,pragmatic functions of teacher talk are mainly to lead-in and end the classroom teaching and alleviate students’ anxiety of making mistakes,it has contributed to create a harmonious and relaxed teaching atmosphere.(3)In addition,through teaching practice,the author finds that the pragmatic empathic discourse-oriented English teaching model has two obvious positive effects on middle school students’ English learning: First,it promotes the development of students’ comprehensive English ability.Second,the students’ English learning emotional attitude become more active.In sum,in the guidance of the framework of adaptation theory,the study deepens the understanding of empathy from the perspective of pragmatics and enriches the corpus system of teacher talk.In terms of teaching practice,dynamic use of teachers’ empathic discourse can not only improve students’ interest in English learning,but also produce positive effects on students’ comprehensive ability,which has important practical significance.