An Interpersonal Pragmatic Study Of Interaction In The Chinese EFL High School Classroom

In recent years,classroom interaction has become a research focus in the linguistics field at home and abroad.It plays a significant role in the teaching process,the teaching results,and the maintenance of good relationships between teachers and students.Researchers have studied classroom interaction from the perspectives of behaviorism,discourse analysis,multimodal discourse analysis,pragmatics,and corpus linguistics.However,most of their studies focus on college English classrooms while only a few of them have been conducted at the high school level.This study takes an interpersonal pragmatic perspective to explore how interaction affects the interpersonal relationship in the EFL classrooms.A mixed method of qualitative study and quantitative study was adopted for this study.From the transcriptions of 50 videos of high school English classrooms,110 interactions,relevant to the present study,were picked out to form a classroom interaction corpus.Based on the rapport management theory and the pragmatic identity theory,an analytical framework for classroom interaction was then sketched out.Scientific research instruments as SPSS 25.0 and Praat are employed and along with the data collected from the questionnaire and interviews is also adopted to explore the effect of classroom interaction.This research aims at answering two research questions.First,what kinds of pragmatic identities of teachers and students are constructed through classroom interactions and in what ways are they constructed? Second,what interpersonal functions will be manifested through classroom interactions?In answer to the first question it was found that teachers,as the more dominate party,construct three types of teacher identities through discursive practice so as to manage rapport in the classroom.The three identities are the friend identity,the cooperator identity and the expert identity.The identity construction strategies fall into five domains,namely,discourse domain,non-verbal domain,illocutionary domain,participation domain,and stylistic domain.Meanwhile,students' participation learner identity is also constructed through the interactions.These pragmatic identities and strategies can contribute to promoting the relationship between teachers and students.The second question was explored from two aspects: one being the realization of the communicative effect;the other being the realization of the interactive goal.The realization of the communicative effect is rapport management,which is specified into the management of four components,namely,quality face management,identity face management,equality rights management,and association rights management.An empirical study was conducted on classroom interaction in which statistical analysis of the questionnaire and interviews were harnessed to buttress the argument that classroom interaction can realize the interactive goal that classroom interaction can promote the relationship between teachers and students and thus foster the teaching and learning process.Factors influencing the realization process were found to include gender,grade,English competence and students' preference.Based on previous studies,the present study has made some findings in pragmatic identity construction and the interpersonal function of classroom interaction,which helps to promote the relationship between teachers and students and foster the teaching and learning process.It enriches previous studies on classroom interaction and provides some inspiration for the current high school English teaching.It is noteworthy that factors affecting the classroom interpersonal relationship vary from one another and should not be restricted to the classroom interaction alone.It should be a long-term and dynamic process.Thus,more empirical studies on classroom interaction can be conducted from a vertical perspective to explore the development of students' pragmatic competence.