The Influence Of Teachers’ Empathy Strategies In Senior High School English Classrooms-an Adaptation Perspective

English classroom silence in senior high school has frustrated many Chinese English teachers for many years.There are many reasons causing the classroom silence.The author tries to solve this problem from the perspective of empathy which belongs to affectivity.Affectivity refers to the learners’ feelings,emotions,attitudes and empathy during the process of learning which plays a significant role in foreign language learning and teaching.Empathy is considered to be one of the most important emotional factors and bonds,which connects peoples’ inner world and has been widely investigated by experts and scholars.More and more scholars have paid attention to the effectiveness of empathy in classroom teaching since the 1990 s.By reviewing the relevant literature on empathy,the author found that most of the former studies were mainly carried out from the perspective of cognition,psychology,behaviorism,and second language acquisition.However,few were conducted from the angle of pragmatic Adaptation Theory.The present study takes the Belgium linguist Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory as the theoretical framework and aims to study the influence of teachers’ empathy strategies in senior high school English teaching from Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory perspective.The study tries to analyze teachers’ empathy strategies from the dynamic angle of the Adaptation Theory and wants to explore the dynamic adaptability of teachers’ empathy strategies in the teaching process,which intends to replenish and develop the previous studies.This thesis aims to answer three questions:(1)Is it effective to apply empathy strategies in English teaching in the improvement of senior high school students’ English level?(2)In what aspects do empathy strategies improve teaching effectiveness?(3)What are the motivations that drive teachers to adopt such empathy strategies?In order to maintain the validity and reliability of the study,the author conducted an empirical study.The subjects are 98 students from two classes of Grade One insenior high school in NO.1 Middle School,which is an ordinary school in Dengkou county,Bayan Nur city,Inner Mongolia.Class 371 is the experimental group,while Class 372 is the control group.During the 5-month experiment,the teacher employs two different teaching approaches which are empathy-based approach and traditional approach.Tests are used to measure students’ English ability and the questionnaires are for investigating their learning interest,anxiety and empathy.The questionnaire is a combination of Jollife’s Basic Empathy Scale(BES)and Horwitz’s Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale(FLCAS).From the data,it can be seen that the application of teachers’ empathy strategies has effectively improved the students’ English level,reduced students’ learning anxiety and enhanced students’ learning interest.The present study hopes to provide some feasible and practical teachers’ empathy strategies for senior high school teachers and heightens the teachers’ awareness of adaptability when they adopt empathy strategies.The author hopes teachers can apply these empathy strategies correctly in teaching so as to improve the teaching effects and increase the quality of teaching.