Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
For years, there has been a neglect of pragmatic awareness of the languagelearners. Actually grammatical development is not proportional to pragmaticdevelopment. Even advanced language learners would misunderstand or misinterpretthe speeches addressed to them without appropriate pragmatic knowledge, so inrecent years a variety of descriptions on theories in pragmatics has been sprouting up,especially on politeness principles.As to politeness principles, in 1967, Grice addressed himself to the HarvardUniversity where he made a general statement about Conversational Implicature.After that the linguists attached great importance to his theory and improved andperfected it. But Grice did not give an appropriate explanation in his pragmatictheory to those questions like why people speak indirectly rather than directly andstraightly? Later, Lakoff (1973), Brown and Levinson (1987), Leech (1983) andsome others put forward the Politeness Theory complementary to the CooperativePrinciple, which offered the answers to those pragmatic linguistic and socialpragmatic problems, then developing and enriching the conversational theory, andpushed pragmatics forward.Since 1970s many scholars in pragmatic field seemed to have a special interestin politeness phenomena. Some of them even treated politeness as a branch ofpragmatics. From various books we can know that the study of politeness is mainlyaround the following five topics (Thomas, 1995): (1) politeness as a real-world goal;(2) deference; (3) register; (4) politeness as an utterance level phenomena; (5)politeness as a pragmatic phenomenon.Besides the research on the politeness theory, from the past decades, a sizeableamount of researches on politeness have been conducted in terms of politeness orface in different culture, humor and politeness in workplace, the application ofpoliteness theory in international business negotiation, face theory and addressforms in both English and Chinese, the euphemism and face theory, the use of hedgesin English teaching and so on. Few studies and researches are conducted on thetopic-face or politeness realization in the second language teaching or learning, evenif some scholars studied on application of face to English classroom conversation,they did not make them on the empirical evidence.
1.2 Significance of the Paper
In recent years the English classroom attracted much interest of linguistics bothin China and abroad. As English language learners, the students interacting with theteachers of a target language must be exposed to language samples which surveysocial, cultural and discourse interventions, in other words, which are pragmaticallyappropriate. Speakers who do not use pragmatically appropriate language take a riskof being uncooperative or, even worse, offensive and insulting. The teacher, as anorganizer and instructor, plays a major role in the exploration of students’ interestsand the improvement of their study. But frequently students are not active andattentive in classroom interactions, despite of however hard the teacher tried, whichinfluences the quality of teaching. This phenomenon brings a big challenge to thecurrently popular Communicative Teaching Method and college English teaching inChina. Although there were some researches on the analysis of English ClassroomConversation and the tendency to the student-centered c，英语论文，英语论文题目 |
