A Survey Study On Classroom Instructional Directives Of High School English Teachers

Teacher's classroom instructional directives are speech acts used by teachers to get their students to do things in class. Whether giving effective instructional directives is believed to affect students'task comprehension and performance. Moreover, proper and informative instructional directives have merits in students' English language acquisition. Based on this two-fold function of instructional directives, the study on teachers'instructional directives may shed light on teaching practice.This study purposes to describe instructional directives in senior high school English classrooms in terms of linguistic features, language functions, and speech act characteristics, in order to understand the actual condition of instructional directives in high school English class, and try to find some factors that affect teachers'choices in instructional directives.The database is the recording transcription of 9 English classes given by 3 teachers in senior high schools in Shanghai, plus interviews with the 3 teachers and some students. The major findings include:1. In terms of vocabulary, teachers tend to use vocabularies such as "please+V...." "want..."and "let's..."; in terms of sentence structure, teachers mostly use simple sentence, instead of complex clauses; in terms of discourse, repletion and compression checks are the two major devices.2. Among the three language functions of instructional directives, command, suggestion and request, the most frequently used is command, which indicates teachers'potential attitude towards students is somehow imperious.3. In terms of speech act, the direct instruction is far more used than the indirect instruction. Maybe this is because the direct instruction is clear, simple, easy to understand, hence more efficient. Besides, there are some factors that may affect teacher's choice in directives:teacher's own characteristics, the teaching content, and the teaching environment etc. The findings of the present study indicate that concise, clear, and comprehensible instructional directives with teacher's respect towards students can have the best effect in language teaching. It not only benefits the well-going teaching process, but also provides students with the opportunity to communicate in English; in addition, it helps students'language acquisition.Based on these findings, this paper also poses some suggestions for high school English teachers, in the hope of providing some tips for English teaching improvement...