College Students’ Sense Of Face And Teachers’ Strategies In The English Classroom Conversation

Politeness as a pragmatic phenomenon has been generally accepted by people. Politeness strategy in the verbal communication aims to better achieve the communicative goals and satisfy people’s face want. Face is the public self-image that everyone intends to strive for, which includes positive face and negative face.Foreign scholars were inclined to make researches on the definition, category, and classification of politeness and face to perfect the theory itself. However, scholars in China not only introduced the concepts of politeness and face but also combined them with unique Chinese culture, further to apply them into various intercourse circumstances. However, few studies were made on both face and politeness in English classroom conversation.Based on face and politeness theory and with the experimental methods like test, classroom recording, observation, this thesis attempts to find out whether college students’have realized face and whether the teachers adopted some politeness strategies to save students’face in the English classroom, to analyze the correlation between politeness strategies and students’face, and to test the significance between politeness strategies and students’English learning interests. Firstly the test paper was designed to test students’face want and their positive face, negative face and softening face-threatening realization. Secondly after recording and observing the class in succession, the authentic recording materials were transcribed into written version and classified into categories with typical examples for analysis of politeness strategies adopted by teachers. Finally the correlation and the significance were analyzed by SPSS software according to the collected empirical data.It has been discovered from the research that the students has realized positive face but ignored negative face. The politeness strategies employed by the teachers are positive politeness strategy including seek agreement, avoid disagreement, repeat, encourage, make jokes, offer help, praise etc, negative politeness strategy consisting of use hedges, apologize, give deference etc and off record strategy such as give hints. The correlation between politeness strategy and face is weak but the significance between politeness strategy and students’English learning interests is much.