A Research On Cultivating Teacher Euphemistic Awareness Among English Major Students Of Normal Colleges

As a common strategy in human communication, euphemism is not only a kind of language phenomenon, but a social phenomenon as well. It changes with time, space and society. In the past twenty years, the number of studies on euphemism was increasing all the time. However, in the latest3years, the number decreased a little. That is because the researches on the general knowledge of euphemism have almost been perfect. New studies should adjust their focus and the study field should be extended and be more concrete. For example, they can apply euphemism in English teaching, which is known as teacher euphemisms. Of course, there are some researchers who have noticed this study field and have tried to do researches on teacher euphemisms. But most of these papers are descriptive and lack the power of persuasion. There still are some other papers which give conclusion on the basis of experiment findings. But the objects of these studies are teachers, that is to say, they study how teachers get a better teaching effect by using euphemisms. And there is a blank of studies taking students as the objects and trying to get to know whether the students can benefit from learning euphemisms. So that is the reason why the author chooses this topic.The author spent one school year on the research cultivating teacher euphemism awareness among English major students in one normal college. This research includes two parts, an experiment and an interview. The experiment was carried out in Foreign Language Normal College of Taiyuan University from September,2012to January,2013. Two parallel English major classes were chosen to take part in the experiment with one as the control class (CC) and the other as the experimental class (EC). At the beginning of the experiment, the author did a test to prove that the two classes were parallel in teacher euphemism level. During the period of the experiment, the teaching mode "normal pedagogy teaching+implicit euphemism teaching+explicit euphemism teaching" was used in EC, while in CC, the teaching mode "normal pedagogy teaching+implicit euphemism teaching" was used. After that, another test was given to see the change of EC and CC in teacher euphemism level.The interview was carried out in March,2013, when the participants had their teaching practice in different primary schools or kindergartens. The author had interviews with some students both from EC and CC and some pupils from primary schools to test the effectiveness of teacher euphemism teaching.