A Politeness Analysis Of Consultant Teachers’ Discourse

In the process of communicating, politeness is the faith as well as behavior that guides us to interact in peace and harmony with each other. Speech and behavior reflect our respect and kindness to others. Euphemism, as imagination of language, has existed for a long time with the development of society. "The golden mean" proves that euphemism is an important way to express "politeness". The frequent use of euphemism in communication is to avoid offending other people and to avoid the happening of unpleasant things. Euphemism, therefore, plays an important role in happy and harmonious communication. In recent years, more and more linguists and language learners begin to research euphemism. While consulting literature, however, I found that very few linguistic papers are concerned with vocational counselling, let alone the study of euphemism in vocational counselling. Students involved in vocational counselling are normally sensitive, restless and feel puzzled about their future. Under such circumstances, the way consultant teachers speak during vocational counselling can directly affect the whole situation. During vocational counselling, if consultant teachers pay attention to the politeness use of euphemism, their relationship with students will become closer, the quality of their conversation will be enhanced and therefore useful and specific help for future job hunting can be offered to the students. This paper aims at researching the use of euphemism in vocational counselling, three specific questions are discussed:1) Do consultant teachers deny students’negative or unrealistic thoughts directly?2) As the use of euphemism is considered as an important way to reflect politeness, to obtain politeness how do consultant teachers use euphemism in details?3) Communicating with different students, do consultant teacher speak and ask them euphemistically in different ways?The data of this paper is collected from Graduate Employment Guidance Centre of Central China Normal University via recording and then transcribing. With their permission, the whole vocational counselling process of four students were recorded. The consultant teachers, however, were unknown about the recording to guarantee the authenticity of their language. Each recording lasts about one hour and a half. Then, the four recordings are transcribed. All of the examples given in this paper are selected from the transcription. Politeness theories are used to explain the use of euphemism while analyzing the given examples. Findings are presented as below after analyzing my collected data:Firstly, consultant teachers do not deny directly about students’ negative or unrealistic thoughts. When students complain during counselling, consultant teachers are inclined to listen to them and repeat what they say in order to relieve them from anxiety. Politeness is expressed by the utterance of euphemism even though sometimes it means consultant teachers have to violate the Cooperative Principle.Secondly, after analyzing the data it is found that general questions, tag questions and elliptical sentences are mostly widely used in vocational counselling to express euphemism. Besides, by simply repeating what the students say is another important way to express euphemism.Thirdly, it is found that different ways are used to inquiry different students. For extrovert and outgoing students, consultant teachers behave more actively and tend to ask more questions while for introvert and cautious ones, consultant teachers pay more attention to listening other than inquiring, which conforms to Tact Maxim of Leech’s Politeness Principle.The politeness showed in consultant teachers’language is not only an indispensable psychological guidance skill but also an important professional quality.