A Contrastive Study On Pragmatic Acts In Classroom Between A College English Teacher And A Non-English Teacher

Jacob Mey, a representative of macro-pragmatist, proposes that pragmatic act is a contextualized adaptive communication act, and all the speech acts and communication acts of adapting oneself to the context or adapting context to oneself belong to pragmatic acts. According to Mey, pragmatic act is a human social communication act in essence, which includes speaking as well as other communication acts such as facial expression, gesture and so on. Thus teachers'pragmatic act is actually a kind of human communication acts in classroom including both verbal and non-verbal acts.By using qualitative research method, the current study is an attempt to probe into the differences of pragmatic acts between a college English teacher and a non-English teacher through classroom observation and interview. Reasons that cause the differences are discussed from a cross-cultural perspective. It is hoped that the study will shed some light on teaching in the classroom and improving teachers'communication skills in the classroom.Li&Guo (2012) studied and compared the power distance of Chinese English teachers and Chinese non-English teachers in classroom communication through questionnaires and classroom observation, the results showed that the power distance of English teachers was lower than that of non-English teachers. This study adopted the classroom observation scale designed by Li&Guo. One English literature teacher and one Chinese literature teacher from Guangxi Normal University were chosen for the case study. Data collection was through4weeks classroom observation and hour-long interviews to the subjects respectively.The findings show that the two teachers' pragmatic acts in classroom are different greatly in aspects of illocutionary domain, discourse domain, participation domain, stylistic domain and non-verbal domain respectively. In the English teacher's classroom, the teacher treated the students as equals sharing the experience of life and study with them; the atmosphere was more student-centered; the teacher encouraged students to ask questions and express their own opinions, and the atmosphere was active and relaxed; while in the non-English teacher's classroom, the teacher was the center of the teaching and classroom communication and initiated all communications; students listened to the teacher for the whole class and took notes about what the teacher had said. The class atmosphere was quiet and orderly. These results show that the English teacher's pragmatic acts are consistent with the key features of low power distance at school described by the Dutch social psychologist Hofstede (2008:107); while the non-English teacher's pragmatic acts are consistent with the key features of high distance in Hofstede's power distance at school. Since a person's value orientation will certainly be reflected in his/her communication behaviors, therefore, it can be concluded that the Chinese teacher's power distance is higher than that of the English teacher's. This conclusion is another evidence of the conclusion made by Li&Guo (2012), which is that Chinese college English teachers' power distance is lower than that of non-English teachers due to their continuous learning and using of English, and such a divergence is well mirrored in their classroom communication behaviors.Further interviews to the two teachers illustrated clearly that the English teacher treated students as equal while the Non-English teacher insisted the dominated position of a teacher in the class, which is consistent with their low power distance value or high power distance value respectively.