A Study Of Teacher Directives Of Distinguished Teachers In The EFL Classrcom Of Senior High School

Classroom discourse analysis has drawn researchers’great attention for a long time abroad and it has also raised the interest of researchers at home since1998. Due to the particularity of classroom discourse, most researches in this field inevitably relate classroom discourse with the Second Language Acquisition theory. Under the guidance of this theory, most of the researches incline to analyze the "instructional language" in second language classroom which is closely related to the content knowledge the teachers and students interact. Few studies have been carried out to examine the teacher directive which is an indispensable part of teacher talk. Teacher directives are regarded as one channel for teachers to complete a series of goals, such as achieving teaching aims, organizing and managing the class, emphasizing the key teaching points. Besides this, teacher directives are also related to students’performance in the classroom and determine the teachers teaching effect. As to the study on the teacher directive, foreign experts put forward series of guideline on giving effective teacher directive. Most of the researchers in China incline to study the teacher directives empirically. Regarding the related theories, most researchers prefer Comprehensible Input theory (Krashen,1980), Mediation theory (Williams, Burden,2005) and Speech Act theory (Austin and Searle,1962) to guide their research. In addition, researchers in China usually choose the research objects from the primary school and universities and scare research has been carried out in the classes in the senior high school. Therefore, in this research, based on the Context theory, teacher directives in senior high school will be investigated. The research object in this research is10English classes, among which5classes are lectured by distinguished teachers who are the first prize winners in the7th National English classroom teaching competition (senior high school competition field) and5classes are from the9th fine-quality classroom competition in Shandong. The10classes are transcribed and the transcription constitutes a small-scale-corpus. Applying corpus-based technique to the analysis, the purpose of this research is specifically to identify the typology of teacher directives using different strategies and further examines the lexical and syntactic features of different directives. Meanwhile, the contextual factors which contribute to teachers’ choices of certain directive patters instead of others in specific classroom context and how the teachers give effect teacher directives will be examined. Finally, some suggestions for the teacher will be proposed. In the process of researching, data are examined horizontally and longitudinally. That means sometimes data are derived from the whole corpus, sometimes the data are derived from the specific samples in the corpus. After a deep and systematic study on the transcriptions of10classes, the major findings are:(1) Among all the interactions in the classroom, the amount of the teacher talk and teacher directives using direct strategy occupies a large part. That is to say, the teacher talk and the teacher directive using direct strategy have a dominant role in the EFL classrooms.(2) Based on Context theory, the choice of teacher directive is restrained by several contextual factors, such as social cultural factors, interactional contextual factors and personal factors.(3) To minimize the imposition when issuing directive needs strategy and the context determines the choice of certain strategy. Therefore, the directives are classified according to application of different strategies and their features are examined from the perspectives of lexis and syntax.(4) Through examining the classroom samples one by one, how the distinguished teachers issue their directive successfully is found.The findings illuminate that in classroom context, there exists certain relationship between the choice of directive and contextual factors, which will further facilitate the understanding of the appropriateness of directives given by the teachers. Meanwhile, knowing the features of distinguished teachers’ directives can benefit the teachers who are in the same field.