A Study Of Teacher-student Conversational Strategies In Junior Middle School English Classes From The Perspective Of Social Psychological Pragmatics

Teacher-student conversation is a necessary part of classroom teaching,effective teacherstudent conversation is inseparable from the use of conversational strategies.Conversational strategies enable the speakers to keep the conversation going and improve the understanding,so as to achieve communicative goals.Social psychological pragmatics analyzes how language acts in social interpersonal interaction based on the psychological perspective.The study about the psychological effects of various conversational strategies on students provides references for teachers to improve classroom efficiency.Therefore,social psychological pragmatics is suitable for analyzing teacher-student conversational strategies.This study reveals the social and psychological effects of each conversational strategy on students and explores the impact of each conversational strategy on classroom efficiency.Based on the theory of social psychological pragmatics,this study takes Leech’s politeness principle as the theoretical framework and adopts the field work method.The research subjects are teachers and students in four high-quality classes in junior middle school.After classroom observation,recording and transcription,186 complete conversations are obtained,with a total length of 2 hours,38 minutes and 42 seconds.Through qualitative and quantitative analysis,this study obtains the conversational strategies,then sorts them out.It is committed to providing references for more junior middle school English teachers to improve teaching efficiency.The thesis focuses on three research questions:(1).What conversational strategies are adopted by junior middle school English teachers in classes?(2).What social psychological effects are implied in each conversational strategy on students?(3).What is the practicality of each conversational strategy for teachers?The findings show that teachers in junior middle school English classes mainly adopt 16 conversational strategies to help them communicate effectively with students so that the classroom efficiency is improved.These conversational strategies include class-starting talk,empathetic deixis,questioning,feedback,revision,repeat,English context setting,answer in chorus/in turn,comparison,humors,warning,explanatory summary,elaboration,turn extension,comforting and praise.Among them,questionings are classified into five types: direct question,rhetorical question,hypophora,follow-up question and transfer question.Feedback is divided into positive feedback and negative feedback.Positive feedback is also divided into simple positive feedback,follow-up evaluating positive feedback and follow-up questioning positive feedback.Negative feedback is divided into explicit negative feedback and implicit negative feedback.Revision consists of teacher-initiated self-revision and teacher-initiated others-revision.Repeat is functionally classified into expressing affirmation,hint and stress.Comparison is classified into two types which are horizontal comparison and vertical comparison,horizontal comparison consists of two types,which are upward comparison and downward comparison.Each conversational strategy is explained from the perspective of social psychological pragmatics.Based on the analysis of each conversational strategy,it is found that conversational strategy should be adopted in the specific teaching situation and these strategies are adopted cooperatively.Under the theoretical framework of politeness principle,the use of different conversational strategies observes or violates one or more maxims of politeness principle.Different maxims produce different social and psychological effects on students in different contexts.This study summarizes the conversational strategies,interprets the social psychological effects of each conversational strategy on students,and discusses how teachers should properly adopt each conversational strategy.The study enriches the corpus under social psychological pragmatics theory and provides implications for teachers to improve classroom efficiency.In addition,this study also adopts social comparison theory and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory to interpret the conversational analysis,which promotes the theoretical connotations of social psychological pragmatics,so that the research results are more practical.