A Study On Application Of Face Theory To Teacher Feedback

As the saying goes,“the tree lives for its bark while people live for his face”.Being polite is a good way to maintain interpersonal harmony in that it saves orprotects one’s or others’ face in the communication. The issue of politeness and facehave been discussed by both pragmatic scientists and social linguistics, both of whoseresearch results are numerous. However, scholars who research the face andpoliteness together with English teaching are very limited. Teacher, as the leader andorganizer of classroom activities, plays a vital role in stimulating students’ learninginterest in English.The Face Theory put forward by Brown&Levinson includes three basic notions,which are face, face-threatening acts and politeness strategies. There are two kinds offace: positive face---the desire to be approved of, and negative face---the desire to beunimpeded in one’s actions. However, according to Brown and Levinson, nearly allspeech acts are face-threatening acts. So they raise five redressive strategies from theleast polite to the most polite: bald on record without redressive actions, positivepoliteness, negative politeness, off-record politeness, and don’t do the FTA.The researchers mainly adopts the method of case analysis and questionnaire forthis study. The oral communications between the teacher and students in class arenoted through observation, sound recording and so on. Then one aspect of teachertalks—teacher feedback is analyzed. The article summarizes the typical languagepoliteness strategies by discussing how to ease the influence of face threatenbehaviors through case analysis so as to improve teaching quality.The research found that (1) the face theory and face-saving strategy are alsoapplicable to teacher feedbacks.;(2) there are many face-threaten behaviors betweenteachers and students, while most teachers usually adopt positive and negativepoliteness strategies to protect the students’ face-need;(3) most students are caremuch about their face and hope they can be respected by the teachers in terms ofprotecting their faces during the teacher feedbacks; some teachers realize that usingpoliteness strategies in the feedbacks is good for developing a harmonious teaching and learning atmosphere thus promoting an effective teaching;(4) The factors thatadopted by the teachers to save or protect the students face are closely related to theChinese teaching environments such as teaching goals, interpersonal relationshipsbetween teachers and students, characters of the students and so on.This thesis consists of six chapters all together. Chapter one, with this chapter asthe introduction, mainly talks about the background of the study, the significance andits arrangement. Chapter two presents a literature review. It first briefly reviews thepresent study of face at home and abroad, and then explains the definition and typesof teacher feedback. What is more, the studies on face theory in English as foreignlanguage teaching are also mentioned. In chapter three, a detailed description of thetheoretical foundation of the research is given. Chapter four is the research design ofthe whole study. And chapter five is the key part of the whole paper. It analyses theapplication of Face theory in the context of English teaching, which presents dataanalysis as well as the results and discussions about face of teacher feedback based onthe research questions. Chapter six, as the last part, brings the thesis to a conclusion.In this part, the main findings of the research are summarized, the limitations pointedout and recommendations for further study presented.It is expected that this study can provide some rules and guidance for Englishteachers in establishing a good classroom teaching atmosphere and creating aharmonious relationship between teachers and students by using appropriate languagestrategies to promote the process of classroom activities, which can finally reach awin-win situation between teaching and learning. Besides, it is hope that the study isof some value in promoting the educational reform in high schools in China and indeveloping talents who are useful to the modern society.