A Pragmatic Study On Teacher Talk In High Schools Based On The Politeness Principle

Teacher talk plays an important role in teaching and learning.And politeness strategy works as a guarantee for the success of a class.English teaching is different from the teaching of other subjects.In English class,teacher talk is not only learning aims but also mediums.The responsibilities of an English teacher contain both the teaching of major English language knowledge,and the imparting of pragmatic knowledge subtly to students through his/her talk.So that students can improve their communication abilities by using polite discourse properly.Therefore,the author research teachers’ discourse in high-quality lessons by applying face theory and politeness principles of pragmatics and hope to help the teachers’ talk in normal lessons.Based on Brown and Levinson’s face theory,Leech’s politeness principles and Gu’s Chinese politeness principles,this thesis discuss the following three questions:(1)What are the accounting percentage and characteristics of the four sentence types in senior English class? Including Teachers’ Greetings(with or without greetings),Directives(declarative sentence,interrogative sentence,imperative sentence),Questions(answer by designated student,answer collectively,answer by volunteers,etc)and Feedback(requiring clarification,supplement and embellishments,repetition and complimentary,etc).(2)From the perspective of the proportion of various types of teacher talk,to what extent do teachers of high quality classes pay attention to students’ face ?(3)What politeness tactics and principles are embodied in teacher talk in high quality classes?This thesis takes ten teachers of the 11 th National High School English Demonstration Lessons as research subjects and applies the methods of classroom observation and script analysis.Besides,the author takes teachers’ greetings,directives,questions and feedback as the main observation points and detail these four observation points.The author records the actual situation of every teacher’s talk through the Observation Table of Teacher Talk in English Lessons in Senior High School,and applies statistical tables of the percentage of greetings,directives,questions and feedback in Senior High School English class to deal with the relevant date of all kinds of teacher talk.And then the author analyses the obtained data and makes statistical graphs of teacher talk through Excel 2010.Meanwhile,this thesis analyses the advantages of teacher talk in high-quality lessons in specific teaching cases where teachers can learn from in normal lessons.Through the analysis of statistical data and classroom observation,the following conclusions are drawn: Both ten teachers in high-quality lessons used greetings.Imperative sentences were most frequently used in directives.In questions,the proportion of students’ collective answer was the largest.In feedback,teachers often used retelling and praising.When used directives,questions and feedback,which threatened to students’ face,teachers took remedial measures or used positive feedback,such as compliments and acknowledgement.Therefore,teachers in high-quality lessons paid more attention to students’ faces.In terms of politeness principle,through the analysis of teaching cases,it can be seen that teachers often used tact maxim,approbation maxim and agreement maxim,which indicates teachers pay more attention to students’ face in class,give priority to praise in class discourse and respect and agree with students’ different views as much as possible.This thesis aims to analyse the situation of teacher talk in politeness and improves it better.Through using polite discourse,it can shorten psychological distance from students,keep harmonious atmosphere and good effects.