| Goffman first introduced the concept of "face" and upon which Brown and Levinson built the Face Theory.It has been considered as the most influential theory on politeness and plays an important role in this field.It takes the view that everyone has face demand in social communicative activities,while most of the speech acts are face threatening acts,not only to others but their own faces.On the other hand,they are in the phase of having strong face demand,so they tend to emphasize self-worth and make a good impression on others in the communication.Therefore politeness strategies should be taken to minimize the face threat.Based on the Face Theory,a teaching experiment was conducted to explore the relationship between students' face demand and interactive English teaching.Two parallel classes taught by the writer from a vocational school were chosen as the experimental classes.Questionnaires,classroom records and interviews were used as the main methods.The main findings are as follows: First,appropriate use of the politeness strategies can help to create a harmonious atmosphere and build the friendly relationship between teachers and students which provides guarantees for interactive English teaching.Second,It can help to reduce the face threat and build up students' confidence which offers students psychological supports if teachers add politeness strategies to teaching processes.Third,enough input and output made by the teacher's talk and classroom interactions are important to a real interactive English class.Students with different English levels may have different requirements for face demand and "scaffolding".Last but not least,Teachers should be more optimistic to make interactive teaching more creative.In addition,This study also provides some examples and guidance for teachers to apply the face theory in their teaching to enhance the efficiency in the classroom,in which lies the significance of the study. |
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