Pragmatic Empathy And English Teaching

Affectivity refers to the learner's feelings, emotions and attitudes during the process of learning. It plays a significant role in foreign language learning and teaching. In the presence of negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, anger or depression, the optimal learning potential may be compromised. Stimulating the positive emotional factors, such as self-esteem, self-confidence, empathy or motivation, can greatly facilitate the language learning process. Therefore, it is the teacher's task to maximize the positive affective factors and to minimize the negative ones so as to arouse learners' positive affective reactions and to encourage learners' active participation in learning tasks. In China, English learning mainly takes place in the classroom, the teacher's talk is the most important part in classroom teaching, the language that the teacher uses in class has a deep effect on students' emotion. So the teacher must pay much attention to classroom English. The teacher must understand the true feelings of students so as to arouse their motivation for learning. This paper attempts to analyze the importance of teacher's language from the perspective of pragmatic empathy.Empathy means understanding and sharing another person's emotional experience in a particular situation. Pragmatic empathy is the process of putting yourself into someoneelse's shoes, of reaching beyond the self and understanding or feeling what another person is understanding or feeling. Pragmatic empathy plays an important part in linguistic communication. However, the research in this aspect has not been conducted in a deep-going way either at home or abroad. It has not been linked with the teacher's language. Upon my understanding of pragmatic empathy, this paper makes a tentative study of application of pragmatic empathy as displayed in English teaching.This dissertation comprises six chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction, which includes the significance of the study and the organization of the dissertation.Chapter Two deals with the theoretical basis of pragmatic empathy. First, it defines the term "empathy", then it discusses the development of empathy theory. Empathy is composed of two processes. One is putting yourself into someone else's shoes, that is, understanding the other person. The other is understanding yourself. In discussing the development of empathy theory, it gives a brief survey of the studies of empathy in aesthetics and in psychology, and the study of empathy in linguistics by Kuno, Brown and He Ziran.Chapter Three discusses the relationship of pragmatic empathy between the politeness principle and the cooperative principle. Based on these theories, the author attempts to propose three pragmatic empathy strategies: politeness strategy, appropriateness strategy and equality strategy.Chapter Four attempts to incorporate the pragmatic empathy into English teaching. It mainly talks about the effect of the positive politeness strategy and that of the negative politeness strategy concerning the teacher's language. In English classroom, the positive politeness strategy can be used in the following cases: indicating agreement, using negative properly; expressing the cooperative attitude, establishing an intimate teacher-student relationship, and being optimistic and humorous. The negative politeness strategy can be classified as follows: giving students free choice, making apology to students, saying thanks to students, and reducing the damage of the negative face of the students. It also provides some useful language for teachers in special circumstances.Chapter Five is concerned with the analysis of the teacher's language in Englishteaching by using the empathy strategies. It mainly analyzes the teacher's language in the following circumstances: encouraging, praising, correction and expectation. The teacher must insist on the educational principle of encouragement and compliment, and must not dampen the self-esteem of students.Chapter Six is the conclusion of the whole disse...