Acknowledgments It is difficult for me to finish this thesis without other people’s help and support. I acknowledge my earnest gratitude to those who have supported me and given me great help during my thesis writing.43886

First and foremost, I would like to give my heart-felt gratitude to my thesis adviser, Ms.. She gave me a lot of constructive suggestions and encouragement before I conducted the research and during the writing stage. Under the help of her professional knowledge, insight criticism and patient instructions, I am able to finish my graduate thesis in time.

Secondly, I also want to give my gratitude to all the teachers who have taught and helped me during my four-year study. Without the accumulation of professional knowledge in the university, I would not be able to write out this thesis also. 

Besides, I extend my faithful thanks to the teachers in the Affiliated Junior High School of University, who allowed me to transcribe their classes and choose them as my research subject. Their supports and cooperation helped me to carry out the research successfully and provide me useful information and valuable data for this study.

Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my beloved family for their constant encouragements and supports. 

A Study on Giving Effective Instructions in Junior High School English Class

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(), 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

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