An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Senior English Teachers’ Speech Acts On Students’ Class Participation Based On Speech Act Theory

English education plays a crucial role in China’s elementary education stage.However,due to the realistic external language environment,the speech acts of English teachers in the class become an important way for students to learn English.The specific speech acts of English teachers in the class are related to student participation,which,in turn,acts on the effectiveness of students’ learning in the classroom.Based on the speech act theory and the symbolic interaction theory,this paper mainly employs classroom observation,questionnaires,interviews,and data analysis methods to study and analyze the speech act characteristics of English teachers in senior middle schools and student participation and interrelationships.Based on this,it aims to explore the specific problems in speech acts of English teachers in senior middle schools and provides references and suggestions for English teachers to improve their teaching quality from the perspective of teachers’ speech acts.In this paper,five English teachers and their 255 students from a provincial senior high school in Heilongjiang are taken as research subjects,and the methods of literature search,classroom observation,questionnaire,interview,and data analysis are employed.By analyzing the classroom observation scale and questionnaire data,the following three questions are addressed:(1)What is the impact of high school English teachers’ speech acts on students’ behavioral engagement?(2)What is the impact of high school English teachers’ speech acts on students’ cognitive engagement?(3)What is the impact of high school English teachers’ speech acts on students’ emotional engagement?The results show that: first,for students’ behavioral engagement,teachers’ questioning act(p < 0.001,r = 0.535)and praising/encouraging act(p < 0.01,r = 0.482)play a positive role in improving students’ concentration.Teachers’ questioning acts(p < 0.001,r = 0.447),praising/encouraging acts(p < 0.01,r = 0.412),and textexplaining acts(p < 0.01,r = 0.405)can encourage students effectively to work on problems.Second,for students’ cognitive engagement,praising/encouraging acts,criticism acts,questioning acts,text-explaining acts,and error-correcting acts play a positive role in promoting students’ cognitive competence at a lower level,and among them,questioning acts outperform the others in terms of promoting students’ cognitive competence(p < 0.01,r = 0.388).Praising/encouraging acts,questioning acts,textexplaining acts,and error-correcting acts can improve students’ ability to think deeply,among which the praising/encouraging acts(p < 0.001,r = 0.523)have the dominant influence.Students are dependent on all of the eight speech acts of the teachers to some extent but show the strongest dependence on the text-explaining acts(p < 0.001,r = 0.419).Third,for emotional engagement,all speech acts affect students’ emotions positively,except for the criticism act,which affects students’ emotions negatively.Among them,the praising/encouraging acts(p < 0.01,r = 0.483)and the questioning acts(p < 0.01,r = 0.415)have the most significant effect on students’ positive emotions;although criticism acts,instruction acts,and error-correcting acts can cause boredom and elicit feelings of anxiety in students,the effect is not significant.Based on the characteristics of high school English teachers’ classroom speech acts and their positive and negative relationships with students’ participation,this paper puts forward some suggestions for high school English teachers: first,practice designing the problems to be asked before class.Teachers can preset the types of questions in advance and employ various questioning tactics to encourage the language-studying effect.Second,give students positive feedback in the classroom to arouse their interest in learning.Teachers should give appropriate feedback to students in a timely and deliberate manner and make full use of positive feedback to foster students’ interest in English.Third,reflect on speech acts after class.In practice,on the principle of criticism and self-criticism,teachers should reflect on themselves to address their own problems,improve their speech acts in class,and improve their teaching ability.However,due to the educational imbalance between different regions and the impact of the pandemic,as well as the restriction imposed by the study period,the results of this study are weak in general applicability.We only hope that this study can provide insight to high school English teachers to pay attention to and regulate their speech acts in class,encourage students to participate in class more fully,and improve the efficiency of English teaching.