An Investigation On Teachers’ Instructional Directives In Junior High School English Classroom

As an important part of teacher talk,teachers’ instructional directives guide students’ behavior,explain teaching content and procedures which are connected with relevant tasks and activities.Besides,teachers’ instructional directives provide communication opportunities in real language context,which exerts a positive impact on students’ language acquisition.Therefore,the study of teachers’ instructional directives is of great importance for teaching practice.As a school-based research,this thesis takes Weinan Gaoxin Middle School as an example.Based on the speech act theory and comprehensible input hypothesis,the author analyzes and studies the uses of four English teachers’ instructional directives through the classroom observation.At the same time,208 students are surveyed to learn students’ attitude,feedback and expectations about teachers’ instructional directives.The data is collected and analyzed by SPSS 20.0.In addition,the author interviews the four teachers in order to understand the influencing factors in the use of teachers’ instructional directives,and the causes of existing problems are analyzed.The results of this study indicate that in the junior high school English class,teachers often use direct instructional directives,and the expression of language form is simple and clumsy,which is not conducive to students’ language acquisition.Besides,when giving instructions,directive strategies,such as examples and paraphrase,are not used adequately and mechanical repetitions often exist.Moreover,teachers use more instructional directives with the pragmatic function of command.The main reason for the above phenomenon is that teachers’ teaching idea about instructional directives is not comprehensive,and teachers are not fully aware of students’ English proficiency,their ideas and expectations towards teachers’ instructional directives.Besides,teachers’ preparation before class and reflection after class are inadequate.In view of the above issues,this study proposes that teachers are supposed to update their instructional concepts timely and understand fully students’ learning ability and their emotional attitudes.In addition,they are suggested to enrich and color the expression of instructional directives,and flexibly use directives strategies in order to promote students’ understanding of teaching tasks and provide them with more understandable language input.