A Gender-related Study Of Teachers' Evaluative Utterance For Middle School English Classrooms

Teachers utilize evaluative speech acts in classroom teaching in order to attain an ideal teaching result. Related researches done at home and abroad have revealed that gender-related differences do exist in speech acts. Thus, there also exist gender-related differences in teachers'evaluative speech acts. Among high school teachers in China, especially high school English teachers, female ones dominate in number in terms of sex. The sexual feature of high school English teachers determines that English teaching is affected more tremendously by gender-related differences of teachers'evaluative speech acts.This research aims at discovering and analyzing gender-related differences of high school English teachers'speech acts in class, which helps make high school English teachers aware of the differences in their daily teaching. Based on the result of the research, relevant suggestions are made about how to perform more effective teaching by modifying and improving teachers'evaluative speech acts for classroom teaching.The framework of the research focuses on the classification of teachers'evaluative speech acts in classroom teaching. Conclusions are drawn about gender-related differences of high school English teachers'evaluative speech acts through classroom observation and recording as well as data collection and analysis. In the mean time, the credibility of the research is increased by making a data analysis of questionnaires for students and interviewing some teachers at random. Besides, the data analysis of the questionnaires indicates the type of teachers'evaluative speech acts that is the most effective towards students' studies. For male and female teachers respectively, corresponding suggestions are made about how to improve their evaluative speech acts in combination of the result of classroom observation.Gender-related differences are concluded through the research as follows:on the one hand, female teachers take advantages of using emotion-oriented evaluative speech acts to understand better what students think and how they feel; on the other hand, male teachers tend to use criticism and command, which essentially indicates that they have higher professional status and are more capable of guiding students to make further studies, however, non-evaluative behaviors are most often found in male teachers. Meanwhile, the statistics out of the questionnaires has revealed that command is considered as the most effective type by most students.The research result and analysis lead to improvement strategies for making classroom feedback more effective. The improvement strategies can be divided into the following two types, internal strategies and external strategies. The internal ones can be further divided into the four specific substrategies, improving teachers'English verbal literacy, making fine prepareations for lesson plans, giving student-oriented classroom feedback, and reflecting on and making a study of classroom feedback. As for the external ones, what can be done is indicated as follows. Firstly, improve the course plan for teachers'professional training and organize teachers to acquire theoretical knowledge about evaluative speech acts for classroom teaching. Secondly, watch others have lessons and comment on the lessons among teachers frequently in order to develop into better reflective thinkers and teaching practitioners. Thirdly, establish teaching experience portfolios for young teachers under the guidance of experienced teachers. Fourthly, modify the enrollment plan of the major of English Education and attract more male teachers to work in the field of English education.