中外教师在英语教学课堂中礼貌策略应用对比研究

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
As Brown and Levinson put it，politeness is basic to the production of socialorder, and a precondition of human cooperation‘ Politeness is said to be one of theimportant characters of civilized person and has been implemented in every walk oflife.Politeness is also a skill. Like any other skill, it can be mastered with practice.Brown & Levinson propose several politeness strategies which enable efficientconveying of messages, and at the same time ensure that everyone feels affirmed in asocial interaction. Appropriate application of politeness strategies has been proved tobe very helpflil to make smooth and effective communication.Classroom，a place mainly serves as a venue for knowledge transformation, is asituation where a special communication between teachers and students - classroominteraction takes place. Effective classroom communication can create harmoniousatmosphere and develop friendly relationship between teachers and students. Amongall factors affecting effectiveness of classroom interaction, politeness is one of themost important elements. If it is asserted that teachers direct and orient the classroominteraction, teachers’ politeness strategies reflected in their language will influencestudents' participation and the quality of their performance in classroom activities.Many studies have studied teachers' politeness strategies and suggested apositive correlation between teachers' politeness strategies and teaching effects.However, after examining previous related studies, the author finds that there are fewresearches thoroughly comparing Chinese and foreign teachers' politeness strategies.Most relevant studies chose Chinese teachers as research subjects，and some of themeven compared inexperienced and experienced Chinese teachers' politeness strategies.All the linguistic data or utterances were collected from teachers of the samelinguistic background. With the linguistic data being narrow and limited，theapplication scope of the results thereupon became limited. If a comparative study canbe made between Chinese and foreign teachers, the results will definitely show aclearer picture and provide more reliable evidence concerning Chinese teachers'advantages and disadvantages in the area of politeness.
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1.2 Research Objectives
The core objective of the thesis is to compare Chinese and foreign teachers'politeness strategies in ESL classroom. According to Brown and Levinson'spoliteness theory，the author concludes that if there is any difference between Chineseand foreign teachers' application of politeness strategies, the difference will bemanifested in at least two aspects: teachers' verbal language and students' feelings.Teachers' language verbally realized politeness strategies and it can be seen as thelinguistic carrier of politeness strategies. Students' feelings mentioned in this thesisare seen as external effectsafter implementing politeness strategies. They mainly referto students' feelings towards teacher-student relationship, classroom atmosphere，andSO on. In this thesis, students' feelings will be measured by investigating to whatextent students' face wants are satisfied and their evaluation of teaching effects. Theauthor decides to study both teachers' verbal language and students' feelings for tworeasons. First, the results from each aspect can be verified by the other, whichincreases the reliability of the research. Second, by analyzing politeness strategies andstudents' feelings at the same time, the research can further examine the potentialcorrelation between the two aspects.Consequently, the objectives for this research are outlined in three aspects.The first objective is to examine to what extent students' face wants are satisfiedand their evaluation of teaching effects in both Chinese and foreign teachers，ESLclasses.Then the thesis continues to analyze Chinese and foreign teachers’ language inclassroom interaction in order to have a closer look at their differences in theapplication of politeness strategies.Last but not least, the thesis tries to explore the correlation between politenessstrategy and teaching effects, and offers suggestions as to how to create a morefavorable classroom environment for English learners.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Theories on Politeness
Politeness，as a social phenomenon, has been observed in all languages and inall cultures. It plays an important role in human communication activities. However，ithas not yet attracted researchers' attention until the 1970s. Grice assumed thatunderlying verbal exchange there were some cooperative principles that enabledeffective communication^. However，the majority of natural conversations do notproceed in accordance with the principles at all. Thus Brown and Levinson claimedthat one powerful motive for not talking principle-wise was the desire to giveattention to face. They put forward the first influential theory concerning politeness:the face theory. They developed the notion of ‘face，，which is derived from thatGoffman and claimed that people cooperate in maintaining face in verbal interaction[习.They also distinguished ‘face’ into positive face and negative face and furthersummarized five politeness strategies to protect face or minimize the potential threatto face. Later, Lakotf established his politeness theory with three rules of politeness:doiVt impose, give options and be friendly. In the following three decades, along withthe rapid movement towards pragmatics, a lot more researchers shifted their attentionto the phenomenon of politeness and have set up their own theories in this field,among which Leech's theory of politeness principle is the most famous one. Leechput forward politeness principle to explain motivations for people to violate Grice’scooperative principle.
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2.2 Studies of Teachers' Language from a Pragmatic Perspective
Classroom communication, as a special type of interaction，interests manyresearchers. Long before the existence of pragmatics, lots of scholars have realizedthe important role of teachers' language in improving teaching efficiency and havestarted to study teachers' language. Flanders[i3] defined teachers' language as "speechacts by the teacher which occur in the context of classroom interaction". However，most researches between the1970s and the 1980s focused on the linguistic aspects ofteachers' language. For example, Henzl noted lexical, phonological andgrammatical modifications in teachers’ language. ChaudiW  revealedcharacteristics of teachers，language in terms of speech sounds, vocabulary，syntaxand so on. Hakansson'^^' generalized features of teacher talk, including repeating,speaking slowly，using pauses, changing pronunciation, modifying vocabulary，modifying grammar, etc. Nevertheless，"it still remains unclear what constitutes theoptimal teacher talk, and on what basis teachers make their modifications" Ellis. Asa result of the failure to find out a most successful teaching method by describingteachers' language grammatically, the focus of researches began to shift to investigatewhat actually happened in classrooms.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework.........14
3.1 Definition of Face and Face Threatening Act (FT A).........14
3.1.1 Definition of Face.........14
3.1.2 Definition of Face Threatening Act (FTA).........15
3.2 Strategies for Doing FTAs.........16
3.3 Linguistic Realizations of Politeness Strategies.........18
3.3.1 Positive Politeness Strategies.........18
3.3.2 Negative Politeness Strategies.........21
Chapter Four Analysis of Students' Feedback.........24
4.1 Data Analysis.........24
4.2 Summary of Questionnaire Analysis.........34
Chapter Five Discourse Analysis of Teachers' Politeness Strategy.........35
5.1 Analysis of Positive Politeness Strategies.........35
5.2 Analysis of negative politeness strategies.........44
5.3 Summary of Discourse Analysis.........49

Chapter Five Discourse Analysis of Teachers' Politeness Strategy in Classroom Interaction

In chapter four, the results of quantitative analysis shows that generally foreignteachers behaved better than Chinese teachers in terms of application of politenessstrategies because they maintained students' both positive face and negative face wellin classroom interaction. Meanwhile, Chinese teachers somehow didn't attend tostudents' positive face as much as foreign teachers. More importantly, studentsconsidered foreign teachers, class more lively and the relationship between teachersand students are relatively more intimate.Differences are proved to exist between the teaching effects of two groups，butwhether these differences are directly related to different politeness strategies andhow to achieve these effects remain unknown.Given the limitation of questionnaire survey, this chapter will analyze theauthentic class recordings from those four teachers to examine their application ofpositive politeness strategies and negative politeness strategies and explore how theydiffer from each other. Therefore, the following analysis tries to answer two questions.First，how do Chinese and foreign teachers differ from each other in terms of usingpoliteness strategies? Second，，how do these different politeness strategies imposeinfluence on teaching effects?

Conclusion

After comparing the results from the questionnmre analysis and discourseanalysis, the author finds that results from the two analyses are consistent with eachother and thus arrives at the conclusions of the thesis.Firstly，in the surveyed classes, both Chinese and foreign teachers handled FTAswell in classroom interaction. Generally speaking，they both have strong awareness touse strategies to minimize imposition that FTAs unavoidably effect.Secondly, Chinese teachers are used to maintaining students' face in a negativeway and foreign teachers tend to maintain students' face in both positive and negativeway. In Chinese teachers' class, students' negative face is better maintained than theirpositive face, while in foreign teachers' class，both students' negative face andpositive face are well maintained.Thirdly, there exist some significant differences between Chinese and foreignteachers' application of politeness strategies. Chinese teachers used plenty of negativepoliteness strategies to show respect for students, but they became very cautious whenthey turned to intimacy-oriented positive politeness strategies. The reason for thisphenomenon still needs further explanation and the author supposes that Chineseteachers want to maintain the status of authorities in classroom interaction by keepinga ritual distance with students and this image of authority is tacitly approved by thelocal society. On the contrary, foreign teachers spared no effort to use positivepoliteness techniques, as a kind of social accelerator to enhance intimacy withstudents.
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References (omitted)