A Study Of English Novice Teachers' Directives In Junior Middle Schools

As an important part of the teacher‘s talk,teaching directives run through the whole English class and play multiple roles,including providing language resource for students,organizing the class activities and managing the classroom.Though previous researches have been carried out on teaching directives,they failed to take the receivers of teaching directives,i.e.students into consideration.Besides,the results of these studies lacked further verification since each research method had its own inevitable limitations.By means of the triangulation study,the thesis aims to answer the following three questions:1.What are the features of the English novice teachers‘ directives in junior middle schools?2.What are the effectiveness and problems of the English novice teachers‘ directives?3.What are the differences in the students‘ preference for the teachers‘ directives?Based on the observation,questionnaire and interview in the five English novice teachers‘ class,some findings are reported.Firstly,the features of the English novice teacher‘s directives are reflected from three aspects,which are linguistic forms,functions and strategies.At the syntactic level,direct directives are used a little more than indirect ones.Specifically,of all the sentence patterns,interrogation,omitting and(You)VP(please)are more frequently used.Among three types of sentence structures,including simple sentences,compound sentences and complex sentences,simple sentences constitute the biggest part.At the lexical level,most of the verbs and phrases in teaching directives are at low cognitive-demanding level.At the phonetic level,the intonation and the speech rate are generally unvaried.As for the functions performed by teaching directives,instructional directives,especially command directives make up the largest percentage.The five strategies,including comprehension check,self-repetition,paraphrase,exemplification and Chinese translation,are applied for supplementation though 72% of the directives are given solely.Among them,repetition is most frequently used.Secondly,on one side,the effectiveness of the balanced use of direct and indirect directives,simple sentence structure and mild tone with relaxing atmosphere is seen.On the flip side,the problems in linguistic forms,content,presenting ways,functions and strategies of teaching directives,including the monotonous sentence patterns and intonation,inappropriate speech rate,redundant and ambiguous language,lacking genuine context,low cognitive-demanding content,too much reliance on PPT,monotonous presenting means,insufficient wait-time,lacking disciplinary directives,insufficient use of strategies and ineffective comprehension check,impede the effective teaching and learning in the class.Lastly,it is found that there is a significant difference in the students‘ preference for teaching directives.Students of top,middle and bottom English levels show different preferences for the form,speech rate,intonation and wait time of the teaching directives.Specifically,the preference of the students at top English level for the direct directives is stronger than that of the students at middle and bottom English levels,while the preference of the students at middle and bottom English levels for the slow-down speech rate,the varying of intonation and more wait time is stronger than that of the students at top English level.