A Comparative Study On The Classroom Instructional Directive Of Experienced And Novice English Teachers In Junior High School

Teacher’s instructional directives,as an important form of language input for students,can play such roles as guiding student’s learning,organizing students’ class activities,stimulating students’ interest,and creating active classroom atmosphere.The high-quality instructional directives can not only make the classroom teaching progress in an orderly manner,but also bring a positive effect on students’ language output.Novice teachers and experienced teachers,with a relatively large proportion in teacher’s group,can promote professional development if they can optimize their use of instructional directive and learn from each other.This paper,with the purpose of studying the differences in the use of classroom instructional directives by novice English teachers and experienced English teachers in junior high school aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the differences between the forms of instructional directives used by novice teachers and experienced teachers in junior high school English teaching?(2)What are the differences between the strategies employed by novice teachers and experienced teachers in giving instructional directives in junior high school English teaching?(3)What are the student’s attitude and expectations for teacher’s instructional directives?Two novice English teachers and two experienced English teachers,and students in their classes in a junior high school in Xi’an were chosen as the research participants.Besides,questionnaire survey,classroom observation and interviews are conducted by the author.Through collecting and analyzing the data,the author of thisstudy reaches the following conclusions:(1)Both novice English teachers and experienced English teachers prefer direct instructional directives,but experienced teachers use indirect instructional directives more frequently than novice teachers.In terms of language patterns,VP,Let’s and elliptical sentence are frequently used by both of the two types of teachers,while declarative sentence,declarative + tag question,interrogative sentence are less frequently used by novice teachers than experienced teachers.(2)The strategies of interpretation,understanding check,and code switching are used with higher frequency by novice teachers than experienced teachers,while the frequency of repetition strategy is lower than that of experienced teachers.(3)Students hold the idea that teacher’s instructional directives play an important role in their English learning and they prefer simple and diverse instructional directives.By comparing the differences between the ways of using classroom instructional directives by novice and experienced English teachers in junior high school and by knowing about student’s attitude and expectations for teacher’s instructional directives,this study hopes that the two types of teachers can attach importance to the release of instructional directives in English teaching,find problems and learn from each other,and constantly improve the quality of instructional directives.