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 

1. Introduction

During the author’s teaching practice of about two months in a junior high school, the author attended many English classes and observed in-service teachers’ teaching in different teaching styles. The author noticed that many teachers would repeat their instructions for many times even when students had begun to carry out the task. Sometimes, when the teacher gave an instruction, but there was no response from the students and all the students kept silence, looking at each other blankly. And when the author was giving lessons to the students, the author also found herself doing the same things as other in-service teachers have been observed, making a lot of explanations and repetition in case that students couldn’t understand me. But even so, sometimes when the author proposed a question, the only thing received was blank faces and eyes. So the author began to think about this phenomenon and made some reflection on the instructions given in class. And as is known to all, teachers’ instruction is one part of teacher talk, so the author first referred to some literature about teacher talk. 

Teacher talk refers to all language teachers use in class to teach lessons and organize activities in classroom teaching. In other words, teacher talk plays an important role both in teaching knowledge and monitoring the class. What’s more, in SLA classes, they can also be a source of language input, for students acquire foreign language not only from the text books but also from what spoken by their English teachers. And generally, teacher talk sometimes is a little beyond students’ present English level, according to Vygotsky’s theory of ZPD (zone of proximal development), which can give students some opportunities for self-improvement. 

So because of its great effect on students’ language acquisition, the analysis of teacher talk has been a heated research topic for a long time abroad in SLA research filed. In near decades, it also has attracted many researchers’ attention at home since 1998. 

Teacher talk consists of many aspects, such as proposing questions, language knowledge input, guiding students to answer, the negotiation of meaning, giving feedback, commands, instructions, etc. Among them, the scholars at home and abroad pay more attention on the research of proposing questioning(Long, 1984;周星,周韵, 2002); giving feedback(McCarthy,1998); negotiation of meaning (Long, 1983; Van Lier, 1997). However, the researches on giving effective instructions are comparatively insufficient and most of the researches just gave some general guidelines for giving effective instructions. For instance, Tsui talked about instructions based on Speech Act Theory (Tsui, 2001)); Hughes studied instructions on their classification and functions (Hughes, 1993). As for the researchers at home, their related researches just started in recent years, like ( Zhu, 2002; Liu, 2007). And few of them have touched upon the linguistic features and functional types of instructions.   

So it is quite necessary to make a research about the instructions given by English teachers in EFL classrooms, which may determine the teaching effect and students’ learning efficiency to a large degree. And as for the research target, because of the author’s two months’ teaching practice in a middle school, so this thesis will focus on giving effective instructions in junior high school English classes.