A Study Of Teachers' Instructional Directives In Elementarv Comprehensive Chinese Class

As an important component of teacher talk,teachers' instructional directives,which work throughout the whole process of teaching,are a major tool for teachers to organize and implement classroom activities,and also one of the most important sources of L2 acquisition.So the study on teachers'instructional directives can shed light on teaching practice.However,as to teaching Chinese as a second language,the domestic research achievements are very limited,especially case study that recflects practical classroom instruction.In reference to the previous studies,we investigate 20 elmentary comprehensive Chinese classes(1000 minutes)of 4 teachers in BFSU,using classroom observation and questionnaire surveys.This study purposes to explore specific usage of instructional directives in terms of forms and pragmatics,to find out noneffective directions and eatablish standards of effective instructional directives.Besides,student questionnaires are issued to describle students' attitude and then evaluate the effectiveness of instructional directives.Main findings of this study are as follows:Firstly,in elmentary comprehensive Chinese class,medium of instructional directives are not used very frequently as teachers insist target language first.There are three types of medium instruction:(1)part of medium instruction;(2)mixed medium instruction;(3)total medium instruction.Among these,mixed medium instruction is the most frequently used,part of medium instruction next,while total medium instruction is the least frequently used.This study also indicates that nationality has significant effect on students' attitude towards medium of instructional directives,Japanese and Korean students mostly dislike teachers using the medium of instruction,while southeast Asia,especially the Malaysia students like it best.Also,Chinese proficiency could also influence students' preference,that is to say,students in class A perfer medium of instruction than students in class B while teachers modifying language input.Secondly,teachers' instructional directives should be simple and highly efficient in the form,which reflect on sentence length and sentence frames.As for the sentence length,this study finds that most of the instructional directives are 6-10 words and the average sentence length is 13 words,which corresponds to teaching practice in primary stage.This study also indicates that students' Chinese proficiency,task complexity and teaching experiences could also affect sentence length of instructional directives.Moreover,the effectiveness of teachers' instructional directives reflect on the fact that most instructions contain a core verb,more than half of the instructional directives which include verbs are given in the form of single verb.In consideration of politeness,the other instructional directives are given in the form of verb phrases,such as "VV,V yi V,yi qi V" and so on,which relieve imperative mood and reduce the degree of difficulty of instruction implementation.Thirdly,from the perspective of pragmatics,teachers in primary class tend to use direct instructions as imperatives are most frequently used,which consists of about half of all classroom instructions.The use frequency of interrogative sentence rank only second to imperatives,and we can also see that instructional directives in declarative sentence are less common.Speaking of directive strategy,"bold strategy"with compulsive and direct mood is the mostly used in imperatives,meanwhile,politeness strategiesis are realized by verbal embellishment such as "mitgated strategy" or "inclusive strategy ",which contribute to relieve imperative mood."bold questioning strategy" or "suggested strategy" are also used frequently in elmentary comprehensive Chinese class,which reflect the consciousness and philophy of teachers in interaction and negotiation teaching methods.Lastly,this study suggests that teachers should use a combination of instruction forms on the basis of students' Chinese proficiency,to provide students with rich and plentiful comprehensible input,simultaneously,minimize the use of medium instruction,and try to avoid noneffective instructions.