Analysis Of English Teachers’ Speech Acts In Class

Investigation on teachers’ speech acts starts from1970s. With the development of the society,importance of teachers’ speech acts has been paid more attention to. Teachers’ speech acts are notonly the main medium of teaching, but also the reflection of the teaching process. If teachers areable to teach students and organize classes with accurate and brief languages, they are goodmanners to prove teachers’ abilities. Teachers’ speech acts are the ways that teachers use to teachstudents and give instruction in English teaching class, which are not only teaching objects buttools for teachers to carry out teaching plans and organize classes. Considering all respects of theclassroom teaching, teachers’ speech acts include many pragmatic functions.Based on speech act theory and indirect speech act theory, the paper tries to analyze teachers’directives, teachers’ questions and teachers’ feedbacks and the relation between teachers’ speechacts and the class context, how they work in class interaction and to what degree they are related toteaching efficiency. In this article, naturalistic observation, transcribing and conversation analysismethod was used to analyze the corpus in which there were five class videos taken from differentcities. The subjects in this paper are students and teachers in senior high school. The recordingswere transcribed sentence by sentence to analyze teachers’ speech acts in class and improve thequality of speech acts of an English teacher in the class context. Some significant conclusions fromthe paper are expected to be helpful to the teachers in senior high school.The structure of this article will be presented in five parts: the first part is introduction of thestudy. We will talk about the background, significance and purpose of the study. Teachers’ speechacts have been studied as a whole by educational scholars. However, most of these empiricalresearches are investigations into the quantity of teachers’ talk instead of an in-depth analysisthereof. This article mainly involves applied researches on speech act theories in the field ofEnglish teaching and it analyzes the makeup and functionality of a teacher’s speech acts based onactual class teaching practices. The second part is the literature review of the preceding study onteachers’ speech acts and some related theories such as the speech acts theory. The third part istheoretical perspectives of the study, include speech acts theory and indirect speech acts theorywhich would be adopted in this article. The fourth part is about the research method and analysison English teachers’ speech acts based on the speech act theory. The study analyzes teachers’directives, teachers’ questions and teachers’ feedbacks. Then the later study finds out the relationbetween the class context and teachers’ speech acts, it points out that an English teacher isrestricted by the context and his/her speech mode changes with the class context. The last part isthe brief conclusion of the study. After studying, the paper finds out:Firstly, considering that English is a second language, an English teacher has to consider theactual English level of the students and use standard English in order to make sure that his/herspeech acts are well understood. In English teaching class, standard speech acts will not onlyprovide quality language inputs to students, but also help to enhance teaching effects.Secondly, teachers’ questions play a very important role in English teaching. Teachers’questions provide students opportunities to participate in classroom interaction and to express theiropinions by using a certain language. They also help teachers to check whether the studentsunderstand the teaching contents well or not. Referential questions are suggested to use morebecause they can stimulate students to think and speak in the target language.Thirdly, Feedbacks to students’ answers directly show whether the purpose of the questionsare achieved or not, whether the teaching tasks finished or not. What teachers need to do is notonly give simple feedbacks to students’ answers but also to offer evaluation by telling studentstheir merits and demerits of their answers. Responding the answers carefully, students canunderstand the questions better and participate in the classroom interaction more positively.Lastly, class context is the foundation and basis for students to understand teachers’ speechacts in English classroom. It helps English teachers to organize the teaching process, especially hasto constraints the selection of discourse mode, rhetorical methods and language style.The study is expected to be helpful to the teachers in senior high schools. English class isdifferent from other classes in the aspect that teachers’ talk is not only the tool of teaching but alsothe input students are receiving. Teachers might set themselves as examples to their students byusing standard, proper language. Teachers should ask more open questions that are referentialquestions to improve students’ spoken ability. Positive feedbacks are suggested to use more. Thismay let students feel they are attached importance to and therefore increased their confidence inlearning English.