A Study Of Instructional Language In High School English Classes

As an important part of teacher talk, teachers’instructional language is the discourse used by teachers in the classroom to perform teaching functions, and is the speech act in the classroom to get students to do something.This thesis makes an attempt to find out the characteristics of instructional language in high school classrooms by way of classroom observation, interview, and data analysis. Four demonstration classes are recorded and transcribed. By drawing on speech act theory, comprehensible input theory, second language acquisition theory and relevance theory, the thesis puts its emphasis on the distribution, vocabulary characteristics, syntactic structures and language functions of instructional language in high school English classes. In order to find out interviewees’assessments and expectations of instructional language, twenty students and five teachers from each lesson are surveyed randomly. Finally, the author puts forward some suggestions on how to apply effective instructional language to teaching practice.The findings are as follows. Generally speaking, from the aspect of speech act, the number of direct instructional language surpasses that of indirect instructional language in high school English classes. Most of the instructional language serves the purpose of transition, followed by explanation and management. As for syntactic characteristics, imperative sentences top the list and next come declarative sentences and interrogative sentences. As for language functions, commands take the lead followed by request and suggestion. It can be concluded from the study that teachers play a major role in communication in class, whose instructional language focuses on teaching procedure and teaching content. The survey shows that both teachers and students attach importance to instructional language, holding the view that it helps in teaching and learning. However, what students need is an appropriate amount of effective instructional language while teachers, as a matter of fact, tend to give more instructional language than enough.According to the results of this research, this thesis gives some suggestions to English teachers. Based on careful examination of the students as well as the teaching context, teachers should try to give as much indirect instructional language as possible, which meanwhile ought to be polite, clear and appropriate. Besides, teachers should learn and do more research on instructional language, which will definitely contribute to learning and teaching.