Abstract

Teacher directive discourse, which is one of the most vital parts of teacher talk, plays an important role in the teaching procedure. It serves as a language tool to organize classes and a bond between the teacher and students. With more educators advocating task-based language teaching approach in EFL classrooms in China, whether the teacher gives proper and effective directives is believed to affect the realization of teaching goals and teaching efficiency.

    On the basis of previous studies of directives in terms of classification and functions, this present thesis focuses on discussing Shen Feng’s directive discourse. (Shen Feng is a model teacher of English at the elementary level in Jiangsu Province.) By transcribing her six videoed teaching classes, this study makes an analysis of her teaching directive discourse in two aspects: syntactic features and frequency characteristics. In this thesis, Speech Act Theory and Comprehensible Input are used as theoretic basis to analyze the collected data. Some statistics are presented to reveal the features of Shen Feng’s directive discourse. In Shen Feng’s classes, she uses five types of directives. Namely, they are imperative sentences, yes/no questions, tag questions, incomplete sentences and wh-questions. It is found that Shen Feng’s directive discourse tends to employ much more imperative sentences and yes/no questions, because these two kinds of directive discourse are more direct and clearer for students to make quick responses. It is hoped that the findings will be beneficial to teaching practice.

Key words: English teaching; elementary schools; teacher talk; directive discourse

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1 Introduction. 1

2 Literature Review. 2

 2.1Teacher directive discourse 2

  2.1.1 Definition of teacher directive discourse 2

  2.1.2 Importance of teacher directive discourse 3

  2.1.3 Functions of teacher directive discourse 3

 2.2Theoretical basis of this study. 4

3 Research Methodology. 5

 3.1 Research purpose and research questions. 5

 3.2 Subjects and instruments. 6

 3.3 Data collection. 6

4 Results and Discussion. 6

 4.1 Syntactic features . 6

 4.2 Frequency characteristics 8

5 Conclusion. 10  

References. 12