An Empirical Study On Teachers' Directives In Senior High School English Classes

As an important part of “teacher talk”,teacher's directive is a speech act that teachers use to ask students to complete tasks in class.The directive can be used to guide students' behaviors,and it can also be used to explain the contents and operating procedures of classroom activities.Appropriate directives can improve the efficiency of English class and create a good atmosphere of learning.And it can also motivate students' initiative.However,some problems in the use of directives exist in English class.Meanwhile,there are few studies on teachers' directives,especially the directives in middle schools.In consequence,it is of great significance to study teachers' directives in senior high school English classes.Based on the previous researches,this study is designed to find the syntactic forms and speech functions of teachers' directives,know about students' attitudes towards teachers' directives and search for the comprehensive factors that influence teachers' directives in senior high school English classes.In order to do that,40 audio recordings of English classes were transcribed and analyzed.According to the Speech Act Theory,the Comprehensible Input and the Face Theory,the study studied on the number of the syntactic forms and speech functions of teachers' directives in senior high school English classes,hoping to find the syntactic forms and speech functions of teachers' directives in current senior high school English classes.In addition,302 senior high school students were chosen randomly to complete a questionnaire,aiming to find out the students' attitudes towards teachers' directives.Finally,10 senior high school English teachers were interviewed in order to find out the factors that may influence teachers in giving directives in senior high school English classes.The findings are presented as follows.From the perspective of the syntactic forms,among teachers' directives,imperative sentences take the majority of the number,and then the declarative sentences,while the interrogative sentences are the least.In terms of the speech functions,most of teachers' directives employ the function of command.And after that are the functions of request and suggestion.It can be seen that teachers still play a major role in class.After that,the results of the questionnaire are shown.First,students' cognition and evaluation towards teachers' directives are both good.What we should pay attention to is that the form and speed of the directives.Second,from the aspect of syntactic forms,students prefer teachers to use imperative sentences.As for speech functions,students prefer teachers to use directives to give suggestion.Finally,through the interview,it can be concluded that there are two kinds of factors that may influence teachers in giving directives.They are internal factors and external factors.Firstly,the internal factors include the teacher's personality,teachers' teaching philosophy and teachers' views on students.Secondly,the external factors involve students' English levels,the difficulty of teaching content and classroom atmosphere.According to the results mentioned above,this study gives some advice to senior high school English teachers.First,teachers should pay more attention when choosing directives,and the Face Theory should also be considered.Second,teachers' directives should be clear and simple.And teachers should give English directives as many as possible.Besides,the form of directives should also be abundant.Third,teachers should update their teaching concepts constantly and select appropriate directives to create a good learning atmosphere for students.