A Study On English Teachers' Classroom Instructional Words In Junior Middle Schools

Instructional words, as one of the vital part of teacher talk, play an important part in connecting the exchanges in the teaching steps. With more and more advocacy on task-based teaching methods in EFL classrooms in China, whether giving effective instructional words is believed to affect students' task comprehension and performance.On the basis of previous studies of directives on the general guidelines and language functions, instructional words in EFL classrooms in terms of discourse and functional types are investigated in this study, so as to examine the effect of instructional words on students'task comprehension and performances. The database is made up of two corpora:one is 10 class periods retrieved from ten sub-corpora of existing corpora built by School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University led by Prof. He Anping. They are classes presented by teachers who had won the first prize in English Teaching Competition in 2007-2008 (hereinafter referred to as Excellent Classes, marked as EC). The other is also built up with 10 class periods presented by teachers in The Middle School attached to Xi'an Technological University, with each one lasting about 40 minutes (hereinafter referred to as Ordinary Classes, marked as OC).The study first mentioned the nature of teacher's instructional words. They are the words used to implement teaching function, a speech act used to make student do something, and a language used to explain the contents and procedures before the task in the EFL classrooms. Then it described the concept of TT and addressed some theoretical perspectives and previous studies on instructional words.By comparing the two corpora mentioned above, it has been found that the teachers tend to use some devices to simplify and clarify the complex instructions to match the requirement of junior middle school students' listening comprehension. The author put forward some factors that cause the ineffective instructions, analyzed the reasons for above points and gave out suggestions for some guidance to help teachers in the EFL classrooms of Chinese middle schools.