English Teachers' Instructions In The EFL Classrooms Of Chinese Junior Middle Schools

With more and more advocacy on task-based teaching methods in the EFL classrooms in China, the importance of teacher's instructions adopted to explain the contents and the procedures of an activity to students is enhanced. The effective instructions will be one element to improve the students' performance. Meanwhile, in the classroom, instructions are employed to organize the class (to control the students' behavior and to connect the teaching exchanges), by whose language functions the teacher's underlying attitude towards the students and their relationships might be revealed. In addition, Ellis (1985) claimed that the key of intake turning from language input is to catch the opportunities. Giving the students a high quantity of instructions for a real communicative purpose is exactly a good opportunity, of which the students, especially Middle School students are supposed to make use to acquire foreign language.Based on this background, the teacher needs to have awareness and skills of using effective instructions. These skills include: adjusting complex instructions into comprehensible ones, mastering the uses of its language functions and supplying a large variety of instructions. This thesis will rely on previous studies of instructions on the general rules and language functions, and modification of teacher talk to carry on a multi-layer study on Junior Middle School teachers' instructions with aspect of linguistic forms and language functions in Chinese EFL classrooms.After study on the transcriptions of 30 lectures (10 lectures are given by in-service teachers, 10 lectures are given by pre-service teachers and 10 lectures are given by the winners in fine-quality classroom competitions) of EFL classroom of junior middle schools in China, the major findingsare:(1) The teachers likely use some devices with respect to prosody (temporal variables), lexis, syntax and discourse to simplify and clarify the complex instructions to match the requirement of Junior Middle School students' listening comprehension.(2) There are about three factors that cause the ineffective instructions. They are: no appropriate substitution, fuzziness of referent and redundant speech.(3) As to the study on the organizational function, the findings are: a) The in-service teachers and the pre-service teachers' underlying attitude towards the students are comparatively imperious than that of the prizewinners in fine-quality Classroom competitions; b) The relationship between the prizewinners and the students are comparatively equal, but their underlying attitude towards the students is so polite that they lose the real attitude towards the students as they do in the real situation of EFL classroom, c) The prizewinners' language range seems richer than the other two kinds of teachers.In this thesis, the author tries to conduct an initiate research on the teachers' instructions so that they obtain some significant findings for some guidance to help them in the EFL classrooms of Chinese middle schools.