A Study On Instructional Directives Of Distinguished English Teachers In Junior High Schools

Classroom discourse plays an important role in English teaching.The English Curriculum Standards for Junior High Schools(2011 edition)clearly stated,“Whether teachers use the language used in classroom teaching in a scientific and appropriate way can directly affect the orderly progress of classroom teaching and the initiative of students,and ultimately determines the success or failure of classroom teaching.” As an indispensable part of the teacher’s classroom discourse,the effective instructional directives can have a demonstrative effect and they can be considered as an important way for students to input language.They also have a direct impact on students’ understanding of tasks and participation in classroom activities.Researchers at home and abroad have done a lot of research on instructional directives.Xu Wenrong(2011)points out that there are some problems in junior high school English teaching about instructional directives,such as long-windedness,too fixed and simplistic expression and tedious,boring and formalistic instructional directives in comprehension check.Therefore,this study takes the 13 th National Junior High School English Reading Demo Classes as an example to analyze the instructional directives of distinguished English teachers in junior high school,aiming to help junior high school English teachers optimize the instructional directives.Based on speech act theory,comprehensible input hypothesis theory and Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive development theory.The study selects 21 English teachers in reading classes from the 13 th junior high school English demo classes as the research subjects,the instructional directives from the videos of 21 English reading classes are used as the corpus.By means of the classroom observation scales,classroom teaching videos are transcribed,the required data is retrieved and recorded with the help of Ant Conc 3.5.9.And this study adopts quantitative analysis methods to analyze and discuss the features of distinguished English teachers’ instructional directives and tries to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the linguistic features of instructional directives given by distinguished English teachers in junior high schools ?(2)What are the speech act features of instructional directives given by distinguished English teachers in junior high schools ?(3)What are the distributions of speech functions on instructional directives given by distinguished English teachers in junior high schools ?The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)At the lexical level,verbal phrases that stimulate low cognitive thinking are used slightly more.At the syntactic level,imperative sentences and simple sentences are used more frequently,while interrogative sentences,declarative sentences,compound sentences and complex sentences are used less.At the discourse level,the distinguished English teachers in junior high school tend to use a variety of expressions to check students’ understanding of instructional directives in comprehension check,and the language is more flexible.In terms of repetition,the use of full-repetition is slightly more than that of half-repetition in the light of the two repetition methods used by teachers.(2)In terms of speech acts,direct directives are more frequently used than indirect directives.In the use of direct directives,the sentence structure of(You)VP(Please)is the most commonly used,followed by Let’s and elliptical sentences.Among indirect directives,interrogative sentences are the most frequently used,followed by declarative sentences,Could/Would/Can you...? and declarative sentences + a tag question.(3)As for speech functions,the number of requests is the largest,followed by commands,and the number of suggestions is the least.Based on the above research results,this study proposes the following teaching suggestions for junior high school English teachers to effectively use instructional directives:First of all,teachers should use concise,clear and easy sentence structure in instructional directives and use various expressions alternately to cultivate students’ cognitive thinking and comprehensive ability.Secondly,in order to save time and improve teaching efficiency,teachers should choose simple,clear and convenient direct directives.And in classroom teaching,teachers should use direct directives and indirect directives reasonably and effectively to establish a good learning atmosphere.Finally,when teachers use instructional directives to express commands,requests and suggestions,they should consciously tend to use instructional directives with lower authority and request function,shorten the distance with students and establish a relatively equal relationship between teachers and students.