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 effects after 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 t
