Pragmatic Analysis Of Teacher’s Indirect Directives In Classroom

Teacher’s indirect directives, as the special language the teacher use in class, arethe tool for the teacher to carry out the teaching tasks and organize the activities inclass. Effective indirect directives can not only maintain favorable linguisticenvironments for students to engage in but also build up harmonious atmosphere andstrengthen the relationships between the teacher and the students through theinteraction. With the development of linguistics, pragmatics provides a fresh study forindirect directives.The qualitative approach has been applied in the study to analyze the dataselected from the author’s own indirect directives in the language teaching. Theresearch has three major goals:(1) to explore the pragmatic apparatuses of indirectdirectives;(2) to summarize the typical politeness strategies to satisfy the face wantsof students;(3) to analyze the teacher’s indirect directives from the contextual angelof the Adaptation Theory and reveal the contextual adaptations in the teachingprocess.Searle’s Indirect Speech Acts, Brown&Levinson’s Politeness Theory, togetherwith Verschueren’s Contextual Adaptation Theory, constitute the theoreticalframework of the research.The analyses and discussions of the research prove:(1) Indirect directives areindirect speech acts which can be realized through the secondary illocutionary actsuch as making an assertion, asking a question and giving a command.(2) Theteacher’s indirect directives have a high demand on politeness. They should observethe Politeness Principle, and protect the students’ positive face and negative face.(3)In order to satisfy the students’ face wants and reduce the weightiness offace-threatening acts, the teacher can manage three politeness strategies to deal withface-threatening acts in the process of teaching.(4) The teacher uses the positivepoliteness strategy in the classroom. He regards the students as a friend, or a memberof a group to protect the positive face of the students.(5) The teacher takes notice ofstudents’ negative face wants in the classroom interaction, and employs negative politeness strategy.(6) The teacher uses the off record strategy when performing thedirectives. They are hints or clues that the teacher wants or means to communicate.(7)The use of indirect directives should abide by the continuous making of linguisticchoices. In addition, the linguistic choices must be adapted to the context in order torealize the communicative purposes.(8) The teacher needs to asses the mental worldof the students, such as the students’ cognitive environment and psychologicalexpectation.(9) The indirect directives need to adapt to some social factors, such asthe students’ gender, the teacher’s different roles in classroom, the necessity to build aharmonious atmosphere, the relationship between the teacher and the students.(10)The indirect directives should adapt to the physical world, which includes temporaldeixis and spatial deixis.This thesis is concluded by suggesting that the present study can deepen theteacher’s understanding and application of indirect directives in class. It is also hopedthe teacher’s awareness of pragmatic competence can be further strengthened in orderto perform correct and useful directives to maintain harmonious class atmosphere.