Teacher’s reproach in cases students made mistakes

Abstract

This article focuses on research on the using of reproach act by teachers in secondary and high schools in Vietnam. Specifically, the study focused on understanding 448 reproach acts that teachers performed in communicating with students in situations where they made mistakes. To get an objective view of teachers’ using of reproach act, the article also investigated the use of reproach behavior in literature works, movies (users are characters), and notes from daily dialogues (users are people around researcher). The results showed that the teachers reproached in significantly different ways such as: using other acts to present indirect reproach; using the primary performative of reproach to present illocutionary forces of other acts; using forms of interrogative, imperative, exclamatory, inversion or ellipsis sentence to express reproach acts; using mitigating devices to minimize the level of face-threatening of reproach; and so on. The results of the study are expected to contribute to the study of Vietnamese teachers’ speech acts so that teachers can realize the importance of language in communicating with students and gain useful experiences for themselves. They can also be the data source for studying and learning language and are useful suggestions that can be applied in communication.