The Inspiration Of The Interpreter's Roles To College English Teaching

Jef Verschueren is the representative of European Continental pragmatic thought. He puts forward a new theory that pragmatics is a perspective on language and he uses the theory of adaptation to analyze pragmatics. "The general concern for the study of linguistic pragmatics is to understand the meaningful functioning of language as a dynamic process operating on context-structure relationships at various levels of salience" (Verschuren 2000: 69) .The focal points in contexts are the utterer and the interpreter, for the physical, social and mental aspects of contexts are activated by language users' cognitive processes. Verschueren divides interpreter's roles into five types: addressee, side participant, bystander, listener-in and eavesdropper, which can explain the adaptation of context and language choices.This is also applicable in college English classroom as the English class is also a context. At present students taught at the same time by the same teacher do not master the knowledge at the same level. One of the reasons is that students are not engaged in the class at the same level. According to Verschueren's theory, the best English teaching class is one that each student is the addressee of teachers. Addressee is a metaphor which means everyone should follow the teachers' explanation carefully and take part in the teaching activities.It has something to do with interaction theory, which considers students as active individuals but not passive receivers. One of the common interaction patterns is questioning. In this thesis, the question how to make students addressees through the adoption of questioning approach in college English class will be researched.