An Investigation On Student Teachers' Instructional Directives In Junior High School English Classroom

An effective and well-organized English class can not be achieved without teachers' directives.Teachers' directives,as an important part of language input for students in class,are of high significance to improve English classroom teaching and to foster foreign language acquisition and interaction between teachers and students.Most previous studies at home and abroad mainly focus on in-service teachers' classroom teaching.However,much more attention should also be paid to the cultivation and training of student teachers who are the important part of future teachers in high schools.Meanwhile,junior high school English teaching is significant for the whole high school education system therefore the study of student teachers' directives in junior high school is of highly practical significance.While the following three problems are mainly existing for student teachers' directives in English Classroom:(1)What is the status quo of student teachers' directives in junior high school English classroom?(2)What are students' attitudes and expectations towards the use of directives?(3)Are there any gaps between the actual use of student teachers' directives and students' expectations?If so,what are they and how to reduce the gaps?To tackle the above problems,three student teachers and their own classes respectively of Luxiang Middle School in Wuhan are chosen as the participants.And two times of classroom observations and video recordings for each student teacher as well as 150 questionnaires are conducted to collect the data.Based on the speech act theory and the input hypothesis,the status quo of student teachers' use of directives in junior high school towards the amount of directives at one time,sentence structures and directive strategies is analyzed by the transcript texts of video-recordings.Students' attitudes and expectations of students towards student teachers' use of directives in junior high school are explored through questionnaires and the gaps of both as well as how to reduce the gaps are elaborately discussed.This study shows:(1)Student teachers issue one directive at one time most and then two or three directives at one time take the second and third places respectively.They sometimes issue four to eight directives at one time;The direct directives of(You)+VP+(please)and elliptical sentence are in predominance.They sometimes use other types of sentence structures;They seldom use directive strategies in class and most of directive strategies they used are explanation and repetition.Translation is hardly used compared with other strategies.(2)The majority of students expect teachers to issue one to three directives at one time.They expect teachers to use various sentence structures of directives and they prefer(You)+VP+(please)and elliptical sentence.For indirect directives,they prefer interrogative and "could you...".Most students hope that teachers use various kinds of directive strategies,especially explanation,repetition and examples.And students show disparities on check-up and translation strategies.(3)There are gaps between the actual use of student teachers' directives and students' expectations.Student teachers sometimes issue too many directives at one time,which influences students' comprehension.Thus one to three directives at one time should be encouraged.Student teachers' sentence structures are rather monotonous and various types of sentence structures can be used in class;student teachers seldom use directive strategies in class,particularly giving examples.Various directive strategies should be conducted.Further check-up and translation strategies can be used based on real teaching context and settings.According to the study towards student teachers' use of directives in junior high school and students' expectations to directives,student teachers get to know more about students' needs and at the same time they will reflect on their own teaching and polish their use of instructional directives in order to improve classroom efficiency and enrich language input for students.