Abstract

Teacher talk as one of the main language input resources for students has quite a significant effect on their learning outcomes. And instructions (used for explaining the contents and the procedure of a task before the task) are one of the most important components of teacher talk. In recent years, with more and more advocacy on task-based language teaching method in the EFL classrooms in China, the importance of instructions has been recognized by many people. The research of teacher talk started from 1980s abroad, and most researches just focus on proposing questioning(Long, 1984; 周星&周韵, 2002), giving feedback(McCarthy, 1998), or negotiation of meaning(Long & Sato, 1983; Van Lier 1997). However, the researches on giving effective instructions(Ur, 1996; Parrot, 1993; Harmer, 1998; Tsui, 2001)are comparatively insufficient and most of the researches just gave some general guidelines for giving effective instructions. 

The purpose of this study is to investigate teachers’ instructions in EFL classrooms in terms of their linguistic features, functional types and sentence structures. Considering the feasibility of the research, the present study was conducted in the author’s teaching practice school—the Affiliated Junior High School of Hangzhou Normal University. By means of classroom observation and video recording of the class, the author selected 3 classes (taught by a young teacher, a middle-aged teacher and an aged teacher respectively) as the research subject and transcribed them. The major findings include: 1) teachers tend to use basic words and simple sentences to give instructions; and according to the context, teachers will adopt repetition and comprehension check to make sure their instructions are clearly and correctly conveyed to students; 2) there are three main functional types of teachers’ instructions: commands, requests and suggestions,; and teachers tend to use commands much more than the other types, which indicates their dominated place in class. 3) the main sentence structures of instructions are imperative sentences, interrogative sentences, declarative sentences and elliptical sentences. And these sentence structures used in instructions can be classified into two kinds: the direct instructions and indirect instructions, while the former is more often used than the latter. Based on the research results, some suggestions for giving effective instructions in junior high school English class have been given at the end of the thesis. 

Key words: effective instructions, junior high school English class, teacher talk

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-3

2.1 Introduction of instructions-3

2.1.1 Definitions of instruction-3

2.1.2 The functional types of instructions-4

2.2 General rules for giving effective instructions-4

2.3 Some factors related to effective instructions-5

2.4 Theoretical basis of the research-6

2.4.1 The Theory of Speech Act-6

2.4.2 Interaction Hypothesis-7

3. Research Design-8

3.1 Research Questions and Objectives-8

3.2 Participants-8

3.3 Methods-9

3.4 Data analysis framework-10

4. Results and Discussion-11

4.1 The linguistic features of teachers’ instructions-11

4.1.1 Lexical features-11

4.1.2 Syntax features-12

4.1.3 Discourse features-13

4.2 The functional types of teachers’ instructions-14

4.2.1 Command-15

4.2.2 Request-16

4.2.3 Suggestion-16

4.3 The sentence structures of teachers’ instructions-17

4.3.1 Direct instruction-18

4.3.2 Indirect instructions-19

4.3.3 Summary-20

5. Conclusion-22

5. 1 Summary of major findings-22

5.2 Suggestions-23

References..25