A Study On Feedback Discourse Of Judicial Social Workers In Community Correction From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

The research object of this study is feedback discourse used by judicial social workers in preliminary assessment interview,a procedure of community correction in Guangzhou.After doing field work,recording and data transcribing,it is found that social workers use a large number of feedback in the process of conversation so as to participate in the construction of correctionees' answers.The purpose of this study is to find out the general pattern of the use of feedback types and to explore pragmatic functions of them in constructing correctionee's answers and their impact on the realization of goals of preliminary assessment.First of all,based on the classification of teachers' feedback in studies of classroom discourse and considering the occurrences of specific type in our data of 8cases,we extract 5 types of feedback frequently used by social workers,namely repetitions,other-recasts,self-recasts,extensions and challenges,and a detailed demonstration of each type is given.Moreover,in order to reveal the tendency of social workers' use of feedback types,this study turns to the method of data statistics to quantitatively analyze the number and frequency of occurrence of different types and the elicitation of uptake from correctionees.Then,in order to further reveal the impact of social workers' feedback on constructing correctionees' responses,we apply the theory of Cooperative Principle into analyzing pragmatic functions of various feedback types,and find out that feedback is beneficial for social workers to enhance or restore correctionees' compliance with three maxims,namely the quantity,quality and manner maxim,thus to obtain more convincing,clearer,more informative and truer answers.In addition,the relationship between feedback and the relation manner is very weak,indicating that correctionees are not required to strictly follow the relation manner inthe assessment interview.Based on these findings,the author attempts to analyze the issues revealed by use of feedback and offer research suggestions for social workers,such as they should share more about the questionnaire with correctionees in seeking subjective information.Finally,this study hopes to help social workers properly use feedback discourse and to improve the use of the assessing questionnaire,so as to promote the conduction of preliminary assessment in an orderly manner.In the mean time,it is also hoped that this study may expand the research of feedback discourse and the application of Cooperative Principles in discourse analysis,especially in interpreting pragmatic functions of various kinds of discursive resources.