Identifying intonation features and politeness strategies in classroom language

Abstract

The paper presents the results of the phonopragmatic analysis of the communicative styles of BA students in teaching and CELTA candidates. The focus is made on classroom management and prosodic characteristics used in the speech of two groups of non-native informants. We aim to find the connection of speakers’ national identity and language teaching. Regarding pronunciation as part of a person’s identity, the authors carry out a comparative analysis of English and Russian cultures and examine linguistic and paralinguistic expression of national indexical features in communication. Singling out the strategies that allow teachers to carry out classroom interactions with their students, identifying the correlation of classroom interaction language and speech prosody with politeness strategies provide the novelty of the research. We clearly stated that conventionality of classroom language discourse varied at the level of prosody and reflected national specific characteristics in the speech of a foreign language teacher. Due to perceptive and analytical methods of analysis, we recognized that CELTA candidates follow standardized teaching framework requirements, whilst future language teachers demonstrate the influence of native language interference to a greater degree. The findings show that the tendencies that reveal the status inequality in classroom interactions between teachers and students are in the choice of prosodic features and language construction. University students in teaching realize strategies of positive politeness culture typical of their own Russian culture; in the group of CELTA candidates the level of phonetic competence and personal experience is higher thus they choose phonetic features characteristic of negative politeness culture.