A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Classroom Directives Between Novice And Proficient English Teachers In Senior High School

As an important part of teachers’ classroom discourse,directives are speech acts used by teachers to organize classroom teaching,arrange teaching tasks,promote teacher-student interaction,manage classroom order and let students do something.Effective directives play an important role in promoting students’ language acquisition.Although some achievements have been made in the research of teacher’s directives,there is still room for improvement:1)There are few comparative studies on novice teachers’ and proficient teachers’ directives.2)It is rare to use corpus analysis to study teachers’ classroom directives,but He Anping and other scholars show that such research is of great significance.Based on this,this study attempts to explore the following two questions:(1)What is the situation of the two types of English teachers’ use of directives?(2)What are the reasons for the differences in the use of directives between the two types of teachers?In order to solve the above problems,based on the previous research results and related theories,this study first makes a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences in the use of corpus of directives between five novice teachers and five proficient teachers of senior high schools in Nanning by means of Ant Conc 3.2.2w;secondly,interviews with teachers and students are conducted to explore the reasons for the differences in teachers’ use of directives.The results are shown as follow.(1)As for the situation of using directives,there are the following similarities and differences between the two types of teachers.On the types,both types of teachers use more direct directives than indirect directives.Novice teachers are more inclined to use direct directives than proficient teachers,and proficient teachers use more indirect directives than novice teachers.On the sentence structure,imperative sentences are the most frequently used while declarative sentences and interrogative sentences are less frequently used by the two types of teachers.Novice teachers use imperative sentences and ellipsis sentences more frequently than proficient teachers,and the most intense naked and moderated directives among the imperative sentences are used more frequently than proficient teachers.However,the use of interrogative sentences with more euphemism and politeness in novice teachers is less than that of proficient teachers.On the pragmatic functions,the two types of teachers use more commands,rather than requests and suggestions.The frequency of suggestions given by novice teachers is lower than that of proficient teachers.On the discourse features,novice teachers use more comprehension verification strategies than proficient teachers,but use repetition strategies less than proficient teachers do.(2)The reasons for the differences are that the differences in teachers’ understanding and attention to directives,the relationship between teachers and students,teachers’ teaching experience and language level,and students’ language level lead to the differences in the use of directives between the two types of teachers.Based on the research results,this study puts forward several suggestions: 1)Update the teaching concept and theories and enhance the awareness of using directives.2)Improve one’s own language level and enrich the forms of directives.3)Pay attention to students and consider their emotional needs.4)Strengthen the training of novice teachers and promote their growth.5)Design the directives before class and reflect and summarize that after class considerately.It hopes that the results of this research and the suggestions will be helpful to the practice of teachers in primary and secondary school and the study of classroom directives.