Primary Student's Perception Of Peers' Verbal Teasing And Evaluation Of Targets' Responses To Teasing

Teasing has always been the research focus of anthropologist, sociologist, linguist and psychologist. Traditional researches usually considered teasing as a kind of language phenomenon. However, since 1980s the focus of teasing research have shifted to cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. The research of children's teasing helps to increase our understanding of children's development of social cognition.The existing researches mainly focus on the topic of and response to teasing, perception of purpose and function as well as factors constraining purpose's inference. Researchers suggested that the topic and the relationship between target and perpetrator affect people's perception and experience of teasing. Men and women have different opinion and experience of teasing. However, the former researches merely examined adolescents' and adults' opinion.As a communication phenomenon, teasing is an interactive behaviour, so targets' response to teasing will change the relationship between targets and perpetrator. Foreign researchers examined children's evaluation of three responses of targets. However, they didn't examine whether children's evaluation changes with age, and whether the relationship of communication affect children's evaluation.This study used story reading to examine the effects of topic and relationship on primary students' perception and experience of three types of peers' verbal teasing, and to examine primary students' evaluation of target's three responses. Subjects of this study conclude three groups, namely grade two,grade four and grade six in primary school. Results indicate that:1,The topic and the relationship influence students' perception and experience of teasing. Among three kinds of teasing, all students perceive peers' teasing about weight most friendly and experience positive emotion. Grade four and grade six students have different opinon about friends' and classmates' teasing. Boys and girls of different grades differ in their perception and experience of some topic of teasing.2,Students of different grades differ in their evaluation of targets' three responses to teasing. No significant difference was found among the three responses of grade two students' evaluation. Whlie grade four students rate hostile response the least effective response to teasing; grade six students rate humour response the most effective response and more effective than ignore response to teasing. Relationship doesn't significantly affect student's evaluation . No significant difference was found between boys' and girls' evaluation.