The Research On The Empathetic Ability Of Excellent Teachers Of College English In Classroom Teaching

The empathetic ability of teachers refers to teachers' capability of capturing students' true thoughts,inner feelings and behavioral motives by virtue of observing students' explicit behaviors.Empathy plays a constructive role in constructing a harmonious teaching atmosphere,enhancing the classroom teaching effectiveness and facilitating teacher-student relationship.Nevertheless,it is worthy of further exploration whether excellent teachers extensively own a strong empathetic ability.In consequence,taking the classroom activities of excellent college English teachers as researching objects,the author makes an attempt to analyze the characteristics and tactics of these excellent teachers' empathetic ability.The following three questions are analyzed: 1)From what aspects can we observe the empathetic ability of excellent English teachers? What standards can be used to measure these aspects? 2)How do the excellent English teachers perform in those specific aspects of empathetic ability? 3)At what level is the empathetic ability of excellent English teachers as a whole?The study selects 60 teaching videos from the fourth,fifth and sixth Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press(SFLEP)National College English Teaching Contest and strives to analyze these teachers' empathetic ability by observing,recording and transcribing video materials.Under the guidance of classification principle and common measurement index of empathy,data are collected from three aspects:cognitive empathy,affective empathy and somatic empathy.The performance of every aspect is evaluated and scored,and it falls into 3 levels: outstanding(2 marks),medium(1 mark)and low(0 mark).Finally,data are integrated and then reliability and validity are analyzed by means of SPSS in order to ensure those data are useful and reliable.Only then are objective conclusions drawn.Research findings: 1)The empathetic ability of excellent teachers can be observed from the following three aspects: cognitive empathy,affective empathy and somatic empathy.Cognitive empathetic ability contains questioning,language feedback and homework assignment.Affective empathetic ability comprises instructive language,teaching language,teaching content and teacher-student relationship.Somatic empathetic ability mainly covers standing position,classroom movement,eye contact and facial expression.These can be measured according to observation standards hereinafter.2)In cognitive empathy,questions proposed by most teachers are atsuitable time,with suitable content and to suitable objects.Most excellent teachers give targeted and encouraging feedback,whereas only part of teachers are capable of arranging multiple and stratified homework aiming at cultivating comprehensive capabilities.In affective empathy,most teachers give clear and logical instructions.The speed,tone and intonation of teachers are moderate and blackboard writing is graceful and systematic.Excellent teachers also expand some more knowledge beyond the textbook but is coherent with learned knowledge.Harmonious teacher-student relationship can further promote teaching effects,whereas classroom atmosphere in some class is still serious and intense.As for somatic empathy,most teachers are capable of moving around the classroom and paying attention to most students.They can have eye contact with the whole class and accomplish different teaching aims by means of eye contact.The facial expressions are mild and infective.3)Excellent teachers own a stronger empathetic ability in general.A majority of excellent teachers acquire quite high total score.The highest frequency appears in the highest three scores,therefore higher scores take a high proportion.As far as credibility coefficient and validity coefficient are concerned,they both come up to the measuring standards.Therefore,these data are of great reliability and usefulness.At last,the average is relatively high which means excellent teachers universally own a stronger empathetic ability.Therefore,empathy is of guiding significance for a common teacher to be an excellent teacher.The findings provide references for English teachers to improve their empathetic ability and hence accelerate the process of being an excellent teacher.However,given the teaching competition videos can not be completely equivalent with the actual teaching,thus a profound exploration in the real situation is expected in the future.