A Survey Of Teachers’ Instructional Directives In Elementary School English Class

English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011)clearly states:“At elementary schools,teachers need to pay attention to cultivating students’ great learning interest,positive learning attitude,good learning habits and creative use of language”.This shows that there should be more specific and higher requirements for elementary school English teaching.Specifically,teachers should not only take responsibility for helping students improve their basic language literacy,but also pay attention to the development of students’ interest in English learning.Teacher’s instructional directives,as an important means to guiding students’ behavior,organizing class activities and maintaining class order,not only affects students’ language acquisition,but also plays a decisive role in the cultivation of students’ interest in learning,which deserves attention and research.Based on the views of Speech Act Theory,Comprehensible Input Hypothesis,and Mediation Theory,this study focuses on exploitation of the instructional directives of elementary English teachers by answering the following questions: 1.What is English teachers’ cognition status of instructional directives in elementary school? 2.Are there any problems in the use of instructional directives by elementary English teachers? If yes,what are they?This study is based on the successive observations of classroom process of 5English teachers in a private elementary school in Xi’an,and a survey of questionnaire for a total of 53 English teachers in the mentioned school and the other two elementary schools in Xi’an.Finally,the data is processed by SPSS 25.0 and analyzed manually for a reliable research ground.The results show that although the importance of teachers’ instructional directives has been recognized,the overall cognition status is far from ideal.For example,the preparation of teachers’ instructional directives needs to be improved so as to maximize the efficiency of classroom teaching.At the same time,the author finds that there exist some problems in the use of instructional directives by elementary English teachers: in terms of forms,the number of direct instructional directives is used more than that of indirect instructional directives,and the repeated use of instructional directives leads to the single and tedious structure;in terms of strategies,nonverbal assistance strategy is the most frequently used while translation is the least frequently used;in addition,the words and phrases do not meet the language level of elementary school students and teachers also ignore the use of questioning way to check students’ understanding;in terms of pragmatic functions,the command language is used too frequently,resulting in the teachers’ being too authoritative,which is not conducive to creating a harmonious teacher-student relationship.This study analyzes the cognition status of instructional directives by teachers in elementary English classrooms.Through the research,the author finds out some problems during the investigation,and proposes some corresponding suggestions.It is hoped that the study can have some enlightenment for the future research,and more importantly,give inspiration to the classroom teaching of English teachers in elementary schools,so that teachers can pay more attention to their instructional directives in actual teaching,and finally help students to integrate into English classrooms more easily,thus cultivating and increasing student’ interest in English learning.