A Pragmatic Study Of College English Teachers' Directives: A Gender Difference Analysis

Nowadays, studies on teacher talk have been quite common. Teacher talk is the target of learning as well as the medium of teaching in language classroom. As a result, teacher talk plays a crucial role in English teaching. From the end of last century to the beginning of the 21st century, it has been widely studied from various aspects by large amounts linguists across the world, especially in the field of teacher input, questions and feedbacks. However, few studies have been made on teachers'directives both quantitatively and qualitatively. This is the motivation of the study.Based on the literature review and research questions, eight different college English teachers are selected as the subjects of the study including four males and four females, whose courses are evaluated as the National Excellent Courses that are video taped and transcribed. The data are analyzed and discussed based on the theory of Blum-Kulka et al. in the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP).The study reveals the following features in teachers'directives: Firstly, male college English teachers prefer direct directives while female college English teachers employ a higher number of conventionally indirect directives, although this result is not statistically significant. In other words, male and female teachers do use directives differently, but this kind of difference is not statistically significant. Secondly, the overall tendency in both males and females, which is MD (mood derivable) > Que. (query preparatory) > Sug. (suggestory formula) > Obl. (Obligation statement) > Want (want statement), further proves that gender is not the dominant role in directives. Finally, both male and female teachers tend to employ various kinds of modifiers to mitigate the force of directives.The above findings might be due to the following two aspects: On one hand, the data source which is from National Excellent Courses might play a role. It is known that the functionality of display is the main character of each course. On the other, the differences in use of language might result from the nature of politeness and the gender differences. Finally, some implications are given based on the current status of the college English classroom.