The Application Of Politeness Theory To Teachers' Feedback In College English Classroom Teaching

Politeness symbolizes human civilization, and is one of conductcodes of human beings. As a social activity, language use is subject to this code as well.Since Brown and Levinson proposed the Face Theory, Leech developed it by puttingforward the Politeness Principle, many scholars have explored it in various fields.However, few of them have ever stepped into the application of politeness theory toteachers' feedback in college English classroom teaching.The Face Theory put forward by Brown and Levinson includes three basic notions,which are face, face-threatening acts and politeness strategies. There are two kinds offace: positive face—the desire to be approved of, and negative face—the desire to beunimpeded in one's actions. However, according to Brown and Levinson, nearly allspeech acts are face-threatening acts. So, they raise five redressive strategies from theleast polite to the most polite: bald on record without redressive actions, positivepoliteness, negative politeness, off-record politeness, and Don't do the FTA. PolitenessPrinciple derives from the Cooperative Principle, some maxims of which are violated onpurpose because of politeness. The existence of the maxims may produce conversationalimplicature. Leech divides the PP into six maxims, which are Tact Maxim, GenerosityMaxim, Approbation Maxim, Modesty Maxim, Agreement Maxim and SympathyMaxim. As to teachers' feedback in college English classroom, there are positivefeedback and negative feedback, and different teachers' feedback has a differentpsychological effect on students.On the basis of the analysis of numerous literatures, the study reported in thisthesis is out of the concern of the author and her research interest in the application ofpoliteness theory to English classroom teaching. The thesis, based on a survey on oneaspect of the teacher talk—teachers' feedback to students' performance in collegeEnglish classroom teaching, aims at finding out the classification of teachers' feedback,teachers' politeness awareness and politeness strategies in their feedback as well asstudents' affection towards teachers' feedback through non-participant classroom observation, closed-questionnaires and follow-up instructured-interviews. Datacollected was analyzed through statistical software SPSS 13.0 version. Through theanalysis of data collected, the author summarized the classification and characteristicsof teachers' feedback, and analyzed teachers' politeness awareness and politenessstrategies employed in their feedback as well as feedback preferred by students.Based on the data analysis, the findings are as follows: firstly, teachers' feedbackcan be supportive and non-supportive, and there are three main common characteristics:variety, lacking flexibility and effectiveness. Secondly, the majority of the teachers(close to 87.8％) have certain politeness awareness in their feedback and they are awareof students' face wants. Thirdly, three categories of politeness strategies are employedin teachers' feedback: positive politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy andoff-record politeness strategy. Non-supportive verbal feedback, criticism and explicitcorrection, are bald on a record without redressive actions. Fourthly, students in theEnglish classroom, whatever the top ones or the underachieving ones, all prefer to thesupportive verbal feedback, who expect the relaxed, happy and active learningenvironment.Politeness theories and teachers' feedback are seemingly of two different fields:one belongs to sociolinguisties, involving the way and purpose of the speaker'sexpressing his/her real intention, while the other belongs to applied linguistics aboutteaching language art. However, if they are both used in classroom teaching, a unity ofsociolinguistics and applied linguistics will be achieved. Attempts are made here tointegrate these two objectives in order to seek a more reasonable and more efficientteachers' feedback method, create a happy and easy teaching situation, and raisestudents' politeness awareness and pragmatic competence in cross—culturalcommunication, meanwhile it provides a pragmatic theoretical platform for Englishteachers. The value of this study lies in the fact that it has a positive effect on theimprovement of teachers' quality in theory. It is of particular significance howpoliteness theory is employed to guide teachers' feedback in English classroomteaching.