Pragmatic Study On Teacher Directives In EFL Classroom In Junior Middle School

With the new turn of curriculum reform,“ student-center” teaching is advocated in EFL class,the importance of teacher directives which are adopted to explain the procedures or contents of an activity is enhanced.Teacher directives are regarded as an important channel for teachers to do things such as imparting,organizing and managing the class.Besides,teacher directives effects on the understanding of teaching contents and accomplishment of tasks given by teachers.The effective directives given by teacher is believed to affect students’ comprehension and performance in EFL class.What’ more,the effective directives will be helpful to student’s SLA.On the base of the Speech Act theory proposed by Austin and Searle.The study aims at describing and analyzing teacher directives in EFL classrooms in terms of functional types,syntactic structures,pragmatic features and to examine the effect of the directives on student’s task comprehension and performance.The data were collected from real EFL class observation and questionnaire of Discourse Complete Test(DCT),the real EFL class observed was a junior school which four teachers are chosen randomly and 20 English classes are recorded.The participants are junior school teachers in No.19 junior middle school in Yinning,Xingjiang.The participants of questionnaire are teachers from different junior high school in Yining City,in total there are 52 teachers.The DCT in the present study consists of 15 situations which were considered to be familiar to the participants in their daily teaching process.The findings are as following:1.There are two types of teacher directives,one is direct directives and the other is indirect directives.In EFL class,the usage frequency of directives is much higher than indirect directives.2.There are nine forms of teacher directives used by teachers when they are giving directives.They are bold,mitigated,prefaced,inclusive,permissive,performatives,obligation and suggestory formula.Among these nine forms of teacher directives,“bold’’,‘‘inclusive” and “mitigated” are used widely by teachers.3.There are three syntactic features of teacher directives.They are imperative sentence structure including(You)VP(Please),let’s...and ellipsis sentence patterns,interrogative sentence structure including “could/would...” and “wh-question,yes-no question” and declarative sentence structure including typical declarative,declarative with tag question and declarative sentence with modal verbs.Among the three sentence structures,teachers prefer to use imperative sentence rather than interrogative and declarative sentence when they give directives to students.The main feature of imperative sentence is simple,clear and easy to understand for student.Interrogative sentences with modal words are rarely used by teachers,though they are much more polite.