The Art Of Family Praising-from The Pragmatic Perspective

With the development of Chinese society,family education has been paid more attention than before in our country.President Xi Jinping put forward in 2013 that if thousands of families had a good family culture,their children would be well educated,and consequently there would be a good social atmosphere created.Xi's words further show the importance of family education for the culture and even the development of the society.At the same time,the general improvement of economic strength in family units makes parents no longer satisfied with only providing for their children with basic convenience in daily life,such as food,clothing,housing and transportation;instead,they hope to create conditions for their physical and mental development synchronously.Therefore,Chinese parents are in need of a family education guide in line with the new era.Praising is a speech act.Praising in families is a good perspective which we observe and discuss family education from.Although there are a lot of studies on praising,few researches are found on family praising.Under the guidance of pragmatics theories-speech act theory,cooperative principle and face theory,through the research method of questionnaire and with cases provided in the book of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk,a best seller in America on family education,this thesis summarizes characteristics of Chinese parents' use of praising.By comparing with their children's preferences for praising from similar perspectives,I find out the reference gap in praising between parents and children.This research attempts to provide parents with suggestions on praising,helping parents praise their children better,making their praising better accepted by children,avoiding misunderstanding,and achieving their praising purpose.Major findings of this study are as follows: 1.on the basis of previous studies,this study analyzes characteristics of parental praising from seven perspectives,including the sentence pattern,the topic,the manner,the occasion,the purpose,the attitude toward praising strategies and the awareness of the importance of praising.It is found that the top three praising sentence structures used by parents are NP + ADVor ADJ,PRO/NP +(ADV)V/BE +(ADJ)NP and PRO/NP + V/BE +(ADV)ADJ and that in different praising topics,parents show different preference for a certain sentence structure;on the praising topic aspect,parents do not have a specific praising topic;on the manner aspect,parents make approximately as many descriptive praising as summative praising;on the occasion,parents make more praising in private situations with the presence of other family members;on the purpose,parents praise their children mostly to encourage children and guide children;on the attitude toward praising strategies,most parents agree that not all praising can be accepted with pleasure;on the awareness aspect,the vast majority of parents think that praising has a positive effect in parenting.2.By comparing children's preferences for praising in the above seven aspects,I found the reference gap in praising between Chinese parents and children mainly lies in the topic of praising,the way parents offer praising and the praising purpose.That is to say,children prefer to hear praising about the effort they have taken.Moreover,in terms of the manner of praising,children prefer to hear descriptive praising over summative and comparative praising.Lastly,lots of parents fail to achieve their goal of maintaining parent-child relationship by praising.3.From the perspective of speech act theory,cooperative principle and face theory,this paper analyzes the formation methods of effort praising and descriptive praising.The author gives relevant suggestions: pay more attention to the effort of children,so as to give praising from the perspective of efforts;when praising,try to give more details,so that the praising can be more easily and willingly accepted by children,in order to achieve the positive effect of praising.Lastly,three types of undesired praising are listed also for reference.