Teachers' Instructional Directives

Instructional directives(IDs)are speech acts by which teachers get their students to do things in class.Whether giving effective instructional directives is believed to affect students' task comprehension and performance.So the study on teachers' instructional directives can shed light on teaching practice.This study purposes to describe instructional directives in EFL classrooms in terms of functional types,syntactic structures,mediational features(how teachers facilitate students' learning through interaction);and to examine the effect of ID on students' task comprehension and performances.The database is the recording transcription of 9 EFL classes in high schools plus stimulated recall interviews.The major findings include:1)there are four functional types of instructional directives: pure directions,direction plus explanation,direction plus emphatic repetition and direction plus check-up,but the ratio of pure direction is much higher than that of the other three types;2)sentence structures used in instructional directives include:a. (You)VP(please),b.Let's...and abbreviated instructional directives;c.Could you Can you/Would you...?,d.declaratives and declarative + tag question.The ratio of the first two structures,which are categorized as direct IDs,are higher than the latter two categorized as indirect IDs;3)four mediational features are found out in the present study:creating relevant context,guiding strategies,affective support and providing resources.These features are all found to facilitate students in comprehending the IDs and performing the tasks;4)the clearer the IDs are and the more relevant the context is,the better the students' task comprehension and performance,this is the case both with the higher achievers and the lower achievers of English learning.However,when facing improper IDs,students' task comprehension and performance are unfavorably affected,which may result in their difficulty to understand and perform the task.The findings of the present study indicate that clear and effective instructional directives can contribute to students' active participation and satisfactory performance and thus make classroom teaching more effective.