Pre-service Teachers' Beliefs And Practice Of Classroom Instructional Directives

As an important component of teacher's classroom discourse,classroom instructional directives are a type of procedural explanation that is specifically designed to organize classroom instructional activities.Also,it has the function of classroom organization and management,and it is an important tool for teachers to manage classrooms.However,the previous studies have mainly aimed at the research on the language forms and functional features of classroom instructional directives used by senior high school English teachers and there are few studies with focus on English teachers' cognition of classroom instructional directives and its use.A great many of studies have shown that belief is the guide of behavior,acting as the direction of performance.Any teachers' teaching behaviors have certain cognitive support or beliefs underlying it.The use of classroom instructional directives by pre-service teachers is no exception.How do pre-service English teachers understand and use classroom instructional directives? What is the situation of pre-service English teachers' cognition and behavior of the use of classroom instructional directives? What is the relationship between their cognition and behavior? This study is intended to make an effort to explore these questions.In this paper,a case study was conducted by using the micro-teaching of 2016 Master of Education program students(majoring in ELT)at Chongqing C University.Data were collected through the methods of questionnaires,interviews and self-built small corpora.And SPSS19.0 software was also used to statistically process the data.The questionnaires and interviews in this study include seven dimensions: the terms,definition,classification,functions,linguistic features,occasions and principles.The actual micro-teaching corpus covers five dimensions: classification,functions,linguistic features,occasions and principles.The results are summarized as follows:1.Pre-service English teachers' cognition of classroom instructional directives and the use — the subjects have a clear understanding of the definitions,classification,functions,occasions and principles.Specifically speaking,they can all elaborate their views on the definition of classroom instructional languages.They all know that there are direct and indirect instructional languages as well as three major functions: request,suggestion,and command.They can all mention the most commonly used occasions and answer the principle of classroom instructional languages.But they are not clear about the terms and linguistic features of classroom instructional languages.However,the background of undergraduate majors of pre-service English teachers influences their beliefs of the terms,classification,linguistic features,and principles of classroom instructional directives.2.Pre-service English teachers' use of classroom instructional directives — their cognition is consistent with their behavior in terms of the practice of categories and principles,but not inconsistent in functions,linguistic features and principles.Specifically,1)pre-service English teachers usually use the instructional languages aimed for request function,followed by command function,and suggestion function is the least frequently used;2)the average English language use rate reaches 98%;the choice of vocabulary is relatively simple;the ratio of simple sentences is larger than that of compound sentences used,the complex sentences are rarely used;the overall speed was slow;3)the instructional directives are mainly used in activities organizing and classroom teaching;4)they all follow the simple principle when use instructional directives.3.Pre-service English teachers' cognitive and behavioral relationships in the use of classroom instructional directives and the influencing factors — teachers' cognition of classroom instructional directives influences their behaviors to a certain extent.Specifically,there is a positive correlation between pre-service English teachers' cognition and their behaviors in classification.In terms of the cognition of the functions,linguistic features,occasions,and principle,there is no statistically significant correlation.Factors such as undergraduate majors,teacher' personal factors and students' actual situation have caused inconsistence of their cognition and behavior in a way.It is found that there is still a certain gap between their behavior and their cognition.According to the above research findings,in order to improve the pre-service English teachers' cognitive and behavioral development of classroom instructionaldirectives,the author proposes some suggestions for pre-service English teachers and the university.