A Study Of Classroom Instructional Directives Of High School English Teachers From The Perspective Of Classroom Interaction

As a vital component of teacher talk, teachers’ instructional directive is not only an important source of input for students but also a necessary tool for teachers to manage the class as well as a channel to perform teaching functions. The inefficiency of teachers’ directives in current English classes and the former researches focused on static functional and linguistic features of directives make it necessary to explore the dynamic nature of it from the perspective of classroom interaction.Based on the Socio-cultural theories and the interaction hypothesis, this study describes an excellent EFL teacher’s instructional directives in terms of pragmatic functions, linguistic features and communicative strategies used in teacher-student interaction as well as the impact on students, from which the teacher’s beliefs are explored. The main research methods include classroom observation, audio recording and semi-structured interview on the teacher.The data is processed by following the protocol of content analysis and applied conversation analysis.The research findings show that the teacher prefers direct directives to indirect ones,featuring three structures(You(VP) please, let’s…, declaratives). In terms of pragmatic functions, the teacher seldom uses directives for controlling classroom discipline and sometimes uses directives for initiating students’ actions. She seems to use combined directives frequently and expand some of the task instructions in three classroom micro contexts:(1)when classroom task is complex;(2)when students are not familiar with the skills or strategies needed for doing tasks;(3)when students have difficulty in language while doing tasks. The teacher adopts different ways of expanding the instructions: explaining the task step by step; giving instructions on the skills and strategies before students do the task or demonstrating how to do the task, during which the teacher employs a series of positive communicative strategies in an effort to help students understand the tasks and make preparation for doing the tasks. All these findings show that teacher may possibly hold the student-centered teaching belief, which manifests itself in the teacher’s scaffolding students when necessary.The research may provide empirical reference for teachers and enrich research on high school classroom interaction.