A Comparative Study Of Teachers’ Indirect Speech Acts In EFL Classrooms Of Secondary And Higher Educational Systems

Indirect Speech Act,one of the vital part of pragmatics,is to guide people to understand the implied meaning of the speaker,which has drawn great attention from scholars abroad and at home.This research was intended to study the use of indirect speech acts by English teachers in secondary and higher educational systems and to verify the hypothesis that the higher educational level English teachers teach at,the more indirect speech acts they use in English classes as students’ cognitive abilities grow,which means the ability of human brain to process and extract information.The reasons why this topic was chosen were given as follows.First,there were a lot of researches on ISA abroad and at home,most of which focused on the perspectives of theory introduction,how to teach by using indirect speech acts,literature analysis,philosophy and so on,while few scholars discovered the difference of students’ cognitive abilities needed to be noticed by English teachers who teach in different phases of education.Second,most schools in our country have changed the traditional grammar teaching method into communicative teaching method to improve the students’ communicative competence in real life which attaches more importance to the communication between English teachers and students.However,the cognitive abilities of students in different educational level are not the same,which requires different strategies of communication.As a result of the two reasons,this research was conducted to answer the following two questions and to verify one hypothesis:(1)What is the difference of indirect speech acts used by English teachers in secondary and higher educational systems?(2)What types of indirect speech acts are used by English teachers in the schools of different educational levels?(3)To verify the hypothesis that the higher educational level these English teachers teach at,the more indirect speech acts they use in English classes as students’ cognitive abilities grow.The theoretical foundation of this thesis was laid on Indirect Speech Act Theory by J.R.Searle(1969,1975)after reviews on the achievements of previous scholars.Moreover,Speech Act Theory by J.L.Austin(1962),Politeness Principle by G.Leech(1983),and Face-saving Theory by Brown and Levinson(1987)were also used to facilitate the explanation of the reasons of indirect speech acts of English teachers.As for the methodology,both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied.The procedure of this research was as follows.First,previous studies on indirect speech acts were reviewed to narrow the scope of this thesis and the brief introduction was made to Indirect Speech Act Theory employed in this thesis.Second,a comparative study of the use of indirect speech acts of English teachers in secondary and higher educational systems was conducted.In this research,the secondary educational system included grade two of junior and senior high schools while non-English majors,English majors and postgraduates were embedded in the higher educational system.Fifteen classes of those English teachers with 15-30 years teaching experience,aged 30-45 in Hongdu Middle School,No.1 High School in Liantang and Nanchang University were recorded whose use frequency of indirect speech acts was made a list to compare.After analyzing the recordings by qualitative method,five of the English teachers were picked out who have the ability to make full use of indirect speech acts to establish harmonious atmosphere in English classes.And a semi-structured interview and an in-depth interview were conducted to illustrate and supplement these findings about suggestions by means of taking notes and recording.Based on our research and careful analysis of the data collected,the major findings were as follows:1)The differences of indirect speech acts used by English teachers in secondary and higher educational systems lied mainly in the frequency and types.The number of the use of indirect speech acts decreased from English teachers of postgraduate classes to junior high school classes as a whole.What’s more.There existed some differences in secondary educational system as well.Compared to English teachers of junior high school classes,English teachers of senior high school classes used less indirect speech acts.2)According to those recordings,it was manifested that there were ten strategies that English teachers always use in English classes,which were irony,comparison,encouragement,hint,humor,suggestion,silence,complaint,warning and gesture.English teachers teaching in higher educational levels were inclined to choose hint,humor,suggestion and silence,while those of secondary education levels used complaining,warning and irony more.3)The hypothesis that the higher educational level English teachers teach at,the more indirect speech acts they use in English classes as students’ cognitive abilities grow was valid from the macro-scope perspective,while there were still smalldifferences in the secondary system where the use frequency of indirect speech acts of English teachers in senior high school was less than those in junior high school.This comparative study broadens the research horizon of indirect speech acts and elicits the motivation of English teachers to pay attention to the cognitive abilities of students and provides some suggestions for them to improve their teaching by the harmonious communication.