| Being an important part of classroom discourse,teachers’ classroom directives have a direct impact on the completion of students’ classroom activities and their learning outcome.In recent years,researches on teachers’ classroom directives mainly focus on in-service teachers instead of pre-service teachers.As pre-service teachers will play critical roles in the future teaching,much more attention should be paid to studying the characteristics of their classroom directives so as to help them grow faster.Having Speech Act Theory and Face Theory as its theoretical basis,this case study attempts to explore the features,including the linguistic features and functional features of classroom directives of English pre-service teachers in a senior high school as well as the main factors affecting their classroom directives.It aims to discuss the following two questions:(1)What are the features of pre-service teachers’ classroom directives in an English classroom of senior high school?(2)What factors affect the pre-service teachers’ directives in an English classroom of senior high school?Four pre-service teachers who have different genders,educational backgrounds and teaching grades were chosen as the research participants in a senior high school in Guangzhou.Also,16 students from pre-service teachers’ classes were interviewed.Employing such instruments as interviews,classroom observation and videos and teachers’ reflective journals,the study,which lasts for three months,examines the features and influencing factors of pre-service teachers’ classroom directives.The key findings of the study include:(1)In lexical features,English pre-service teachers tend to use the personal pronoun “you” to ensure their authoritative power.Meanwhile,a number of modal verbs and “let’s” are frequently used by pre-service teachers to mitigate the imperative power of their classroom directives.In syntactic features,imperative sentences are mostly employed by English pre-service teachers.The syntactic expressions of “bold” and “mitigated” take the majority while other expressions only take a small proportion.This shows that although pre-service teachers try to improve the diversity of their classroom directives to ease students’ nervousness to some extent,their preference on sentence types are still direct directives ignoring students’ negative face.In discourse features,English pre-service teachers tend to add additional code markers in their classroom directives.Besides,the device of repetition is also employed.The number of full-repetition is relatively higher than that of halfrepetition.(2)For the functional features,command function is the most frequently used among pre-service teachers,which may make classroom atmosphere intense.(3)There are three kinds of factors influencing pre-service teachers’ classroom directives.Firstly,factors of teachers refer to teacher’s teaching beliefs,teacher’s personality,teacher’s preparation before class and teacher’s relationship with students.Secondly,factors of students involve students’ English level and students’ feedback.In addition,other factors include teaching contents,classroom discipline as well as associates’ observation.It is found that the classroom directives of pre-service teachers fail to follow the principles of Face Theory.Therefore,it is urgent for pre-service teachers to improve the awareness and proficiency of their classroom directives.Drawing from the above findings,some suggestions are put forward to English pre-service teachers.Firstly,diversity and politeness should be presented in the lexis,sentence structures,discourse and functions of teachers’ classroom directives.Secondly,teachers’ classroom directives should be carefully planned and reflected on so that classroom activities might be managed effectively and a harmonious classroom atmosphere for students might be created. |
