Pragmatic Analysis Of Teacher Talk

Teacher talk is the special language the teacher uses when addressing L2 learners in the classroom. It is not only the goal of teaching and learning, but also the tool of teacher's carrying out the teaching tasks and organizing the classroom activities. Teacher talk involves many pragmatic functions as far as all respects of classroom teaching are concerned. Especially, it plays an important part in yielding favorable linguistic environments for learners to engage in. Effective teacher talk can create harmonious atmosphere in foreign language teaching and at the same time regulate the relationship between the teacher and the students through the classroom interaction.The recent years have seen gradual changes in teachers'role in the classroom, particularly in the student-centered classroom. Rather than a lecturer or an authority of knowledge, the teacher is now a model or a facilitator who is dependable on the strategies of teacher talk. In the special context of classroom interaction, the way of teacher talk plays a vital part in regulating the interpersonal relationship and avoiding threatening the students'face. He tends to adopt more effective discourse strategies to behave in a warmer, responsive manner towards the students and foster interpersonal communication skills and patterns of cooperative interaction.The present study probes into features of teacher talk with linguistic politeness as the focus. It aims to find out the main linguistic strategies and linguistic means realizing politeness and to investigate how linguistic politeness strategies contribute to the good relationship between the teacher and the students. Based on Brown and Levinson's face management model as the theoretical framework and the observation of the students-centered classroom as the data, we have identified four politeness strategies in EFL classroom teaching. They are bald-on-record strategy, positive politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy and off record strategy. The research reveals that bald-on-record strategy and positive politeness strategy are most frequently employed by language teachers, followed by negative politeness strategy while off record strategy is the least frequently employed by teachers in the classroom interaction.We have also identified 20 linguistic means in the collected data. Among them,"Inquire for information or answer directly";"Give orders or instructions directly";"Be conventionally indirect";"Include both S and H in the activity";"Give negative feedback directly";"Give gifts to H";"Be optimistic"are frequently utilized by Chinese teachers of English.This thesis may further deepen the teachers'profound understanding of linguistic politeness and its application in the classroom interaction. It is also hoped that teachers'awareness of pragmatic competence can be further strengthened in order to manipulate the classroom communication more smoothly when they learn more about linguistic politeness and make good use of it in order to improve the quality of language classroom teaching.