A Study On Politeness Strategies Of Teacher Feedback In English Classroom

Politeness plays an important role in human communication.The choice of different politeness strategies more or less can throw great impact upon the success of the communication.Such politeness strategies also work in the classroom interaction between teachers and students.This thesis makes an effort to investigate the application of politeness strategies in teacher feedback in EFL context.Based on the analysis of various researches and great interest in the teacher talk,the face theory,the politeness theory and politeness strategies form the theoretical foundation of this research.The thesis,on the basis of a survey on one aspect of the teacher talk—teacher feedback to students' performance in the English-major classroom,intends to summarize the classification and characteristics of teacher feedback,analyzes teachers' politeness awareness and their politeness strategies employed in their verbal feedbacks,as well as explores the effects on teaching and learning by means of questionnaires, classroom observation.In this study,the subjects are the 10 English major teachers and 100 English major students in the Southwest University,the main data-gathering instruments are classroom recording and questionnaires.The collected data is analyzed by statistical software SPSS 13.0 version.The results of the analysis and discussion are as follows: (1) There exist six types of teacher feedback in the observed English major classes, which are simple approval,negotiation of meaning,explicit correction,expansion,recasts and prompts according to the different functions the feedback serves.These feedbacks could be further categorized into two subtypes,the supportive feedback and the non-supportive feedback,and they have three main common characteristics:variety, lacking flexibility and effectiveness.(2) Most English major teachers,the highest percentage,are aware of students' face wants,so they could use supportive verbal feedback to protect students' face,and some teachers could adopt proper politeness strategies in the classroom interaction to achieve the regulated teaching goals.However,they are weak in employing the politeness strategies in teacher feedback systemically and flexibly.(3) How to apply the politeness strategies in teacher feedback is also explored.From the observed classes,this thesis presents four main kinds of politeness strategies used in teacher feedback:bald record without redressive action used in explicit correction; positive politeness strategies used in simple praise,negotiation and expansion;negative politeness strategies used in recast and prompt;off-record politeness strategies used in prompts.(4) Most of teachers and students agree that the appropriate usage of the politeness strategies in teacher feedback could create a harmonious teaching and learning atmosphere, improve students' pragmatic competence as well as build the mutual friendly relationship between teachers and students and finally facilitate students' effective learning.With the results of analysis and discussion,this thesis will provide some guidance for English major teachers to realize the importance of the politeness theory in their classrooms,foster their consciousness of politeness in learning a foreign language and eventually improve the quality of the foreign language teaching.