A Study On The Characteristics Of Effective Directives Of Distinguished Teachers In Junior Middle School English Classroom

As a main media and means of classroom teaching, classroom discourse has been deeply concerned in second language researches in western countries. In recent years,although Chinese researchers have begun to realize the importance of classroom discourse,and conducted a lot of researches, there is still room for improvement. For example, teacher directive is rarely studied and less is on directive in middle school. As an integral part of classroom discourse, the use of classroom directives, to a large extent, will influence the teaching effects. Effective directives will make the classes smooth and compact, and enable the students to actively cooperate, while ineffective directives will seriously affect the efficiency of teaching and is unhelpful for language learning.Therefore, this study, mainly through video transcription, attempts to make a descriptive analysis on teacher directives in junior middle school English classroom, and summarizes the characteristics of their directive use under The Craft Model, hoping to give some help and inspirations on choosing and using directives for English teachers. Based on qualitative data analysis, this study has selected twenty videos of high quality classes in junior middle school,among which ten are from Liaoning Province and the other ten are national, to make transcriptions, attempting to analyze and explore effective features in each levels. Besides, by excerpt analysis, this study has also explained measures to give out effective directives. The results show that main effective characteristics of the directives of the distinguished teachers are: variations of pronunciation and intonation, moderate speed, emphasis on key points,diverse lexis, simplified sentence structures, appropriate use of direct and indirect strategiesand proper controlling on modification devices. Case analysis summarizes that repetition,explanation and demonstration, and following up the students’ feedback are the mainly three measures to give effective directives. At last, this thesis closes with this study’s pedagogical implications, limitations and suggestions for further study.