Verbalisation of criticism and praise intentions in german-language pedagogical discourse

Abstract

The paper deals with the peculiarities of the German-language pedagogical discourse, in particular teachers’ oral speech. Pedagogical discourse as a type of institutional discourse is characterised by a pronounced cultural component related to the differences in educational systems, traditions and modern practices of communicative interaction between teachers and students. The aim of the study is to analyse teachers’ evaluative and facilitative strategies which are implemented in the speech acts of criticism and praise. The examples under review are borrowed from German-language speech resources that teachers in German schools are recommended to use in class. To thematically differentiate between the objects of praise and criticism of students the article is based on contextual analysis, which helps to describe the speech acts of praise and censure, using the procedure of detecting teachers’ intention. The analysis of the grammatical and syntactic construction of the utterances makes it possible to determine the linguistic means of implementing praise and criticism in the German-language teacher discourse and to identify the corpus of linguistic means whose main function is to increase or decrease the semantic and emotional significance of the utterance components.

Keywords

• german-language pedagogical discourse
• teachers’ evaluation strategies
• speech acts
• criticism and praise intentions.