Research On National College English Teachers Directives For English Majors

Teacher directives are kinds of speech acts.They are given to studentsby teachers when teachers ask students to do something.As an indispensable constituent of classroom discourse,teacher directives undertake the function of facilitating students' behaviors,keeping teaching order,enhancing the relationship between teachers and students.So teacher directives play an important role in improving teachers' performances and students' involvement in class.Williams and Burden(2005:163)have said,“teacher directives can help students understand the procedures of teaching,meanwhile,it can arouse the students' interests to language learning”.Many researches on teacher directives both from home and abroad have been conducted.Foreign scholars mainly focus on principles or guidelines of giving effective teacher directives,such as Ur,Parrott and Harmer(1996,1993,1998).They have viewed that effective teacher directives should be simple enough.What's more,effective teacher directives should be logical as well.Some empirical studies have also been carried out by foreign scholars,such as Falsgraf(1995),Oliveira(2009).Compared with foreign scholars,Chinese scholars tend to apply the principles or guidelines which are put forward by foreign scholars into real classroom.For example,He Anpinghas investigated the teacher directives from a cognitive perspective by corpus-based method in 2003.Apart from above studies,some scholars(Wang Jin,2011;Cheng Yingzi,2012;Dong Sihui,2015)have also conducted studies on teacher directives with different research objectives.The present study focuses on teacher directives for English majors in university.The primary objectives of present investigation are to explore the features as well as realization forms of teacher directives by English major teachers.In order to accomplish those objectives,22 teachers' teaching records are chosen from the 3rd SFLEP(Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press)Foreign Language Teaching Contest(English Major Group)and the 6th SFLEP Foreign Language Teaching Contest(English Major Group).Then they have been transcribed to set up a small-scaled corpus.After the transcription,the data are tagged according to Tannen's(1984)tagging system.With the help of AntConc 3.2.4,the data are collected for the further analysis.Through the analysis of collected data,the key findings of the study include:(1)For the realization forms of teacher directives,English major teachers often use commands,requests and suggestions to give teacher directives.Suggestion is themost frequently used.(2)For the discourse features,English major teachers frequently use additional code marker in their teacher directives,such as “ok”“please” and so on.Besides,the device of repetition is also employed by the English major teachers.But the number of it is relatively small.(3)For the features of syntactic expression,imperative sentences are mostly employed by English major teachers.The syntactic expression of “Let's”takes the majority of imperative sentence,it shows to us that English major teachers are trying to be more polite in giving teacher directives.(4)For the features of lexical expression,English major teachers tend to use the first personal pronoun “we”,“us” to involve both sides of teachers and students.Apart from the personal pronoun,a large number of modal verbs are involved in English major teachers' directives.For the implications of the present study,it shows that,firstly,the form of suggestion is recommended for giving teacher directives,because it provides students with more time to make choices,and the degree of politeness is also promoted.Secondly,in order to promote the efficiency of teacher directives,teacher could add certain discourse markers to their directives.Finally,teachers should adjust their directives according to different teaching tasks.Pronoun indicating both teachers and students increases the degree of politeness.Effective teacher directives can facilitate students' participation,improve the teaching efficiency,and enhance teachers' management ability,all of which make the present study significant for both teachers and students,especially for per-service English teachers.