A Research On Preschool Teachers' Speech Acts In English Teaching

In the kindergarten, teacher's speech act is not only a tool for organizing teaching activities but also the carrier of language input. Moreover, as English is valued by more and more parents and educators, more and more researchers are taking teacher's speech act as their perspective for the study of second language acquisition and most of them are aware that the purpose of learning English is to improve learner's communicative ability and highlight their dominant position in the interaction. Thus, the quantity and quality of teacher's speech act will influence the success or failure of the teaching discourse. Looking from the present situation of kindergarten English teaching, it seems that children are lack of an authentic English language environment, so English class is the main place for children to learn English. Teacher's language input has a great effect in children's language output because imitation is the most important way for children to learn. Children gradually learn to speak English by the way of interacting with their teachers.In this paper, the author mainly uses observational method to research teachers'speech acts. Through using the teachers' speech acts observation table, the author records the occurrence frequency of ten teachers' speech acts which include the organizing speech acts, the discoursing speech acts, the questioning speech acts and the feedback speech acts. After that, the author compares the speech acts of different class level teachers'and the frequency of using target language and mother language. Finally, basing on the status survey and examples description, the author not only analyzes the factors which can influence the effectiveness of teacher's speech acts but also puts forward some suggestions to improve teacher's speech acts.Quantitative study shows four results. Firstly, teachers' speech acts are much more than children's in English teaching, and there is no obvious difference between the quantity of teachers speech acts and children's in different class. Secondly, basing on the function of speech, the rate of teacher's discoursing and organizing speech acts are in a large range, but the rate of questioning and feedback speech acts are in a lower range, that is to say, teachers have less speech interaction with children, their own speech acts are the dominant acts in teaching class. Thirdly, teacher's speech acts are not directly linked to the ages of children, but they have great individual differences. Fourthly, the rate of using target language is more than the usage of mother language. During using the target language, discoursing speech acts are in the largest range, but in the usage of mother language, the organizing speech acts are the most. Qualitative analysis shows that the effectiveness of teacher's speech acts are affected mainly by five aspects, namely the intelligibility of language input, the speech accuracy and fluency, the interestingness of speech, the usage of mother language and the context of speech acts.According to the quantitative and qualitative results of this research, the author puts forward the following suggestions to improve teacher's speech acts:1. improving the intelligibility of their input-speech in order to provide a language zone of proximal development to the children; 2. enhancing self linguistic competence; 3. adding more interestingness to the speech acts; 4. having more pertinence in the speech acts; 5. creating a wonderful language study environment.