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And the thesis consists of 5 parts: Part 1 briefly introduces the research background, purpose and its significance; Part 2 summarizes the previous studies about teachers’ instructions in EFL classrooms and introduces the theoretical basis of this research; Part 3 explains how the research was conducted, like its purpose, participants, methods, contents, etc. Part 4 demonstrates the research results and has a detailed analysis and discussion about teachers’ instruction’s linguistic features, functional types and sentence structures. Part 5 makes a summary about the findings and gives some suggestions for giving effective instructions in junior high school EFL classrooms.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Introduction of instructions
The main object of the study are teachers’ instructions in English class, especially the oral instructions.(teachers’ instructions can also be given in physical ways like body language, facial expressions, gestures, etc. ) The instructions can also be named as directives, instructional directives, directions, etc., in different fields. And different kinds of definitions will be presented in the following part.
2.1.1 Definitions of instruction
In Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, the instructions is defined as something that sb. tells you to do. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics defines it as a speech act that has the function of helping the listener to do something, such as a suggestion, a request and a command.
Tsui (1994:129) mentions the role of instructions, he thinks that the instruction plays the role of explaining the steps to the students and directing them how to conduct a task or an activity.
Ur (1996:16) pointed that that the instruction is a special type of explanation, which plays an crucial part in connecting the exchanges in the teaching process. From Ur’s definition, it can be concluded that instructions are explanations of procedures of performing activities, which share some similarities with Tsui’ s opinion. Instructions are used to smooth the teaching process and create a link between the teacher and the students.
Apart from the definitions made by foreign scholars, there are also some different definitions about instructions made by Chinese researchers. Liu (2007) considered the instructions as “one special kind of utterance used by teachers request and instruct students what they should do and how to do.” Xun (2008) claims that “instructions are kind of utterance that can be used to organize classroom teaching, activities and relevant operational procedure, and it is an indispensable part of classroom language of teachers.”
To sum up, we can definite instructions like this: teachers’ instructions is a kind of teacher talk, which is mainly used to organize and manage the class, encourage students take a more active part in classroom activities and create a smooth transition in teaching process. Therefore, it is very important for teachers to use it properly to organize the class.
2.1.2 The functional types of instructions
From the perspective of speech act, Austin and Searle (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969, 1979) claim that instructions mainly include requests, commands, prohibitions, and suggestions. Hughes(1993:59) also thinks that the most important functions of instructions are: 1) commands; 2) requests; 3) suggestions. In daily life, we choose these three expression ways according to the speaker’s social status, occasion, context,etc. As for in classroom, the choice of different expression ways can indicates the teachers’ potential attitudes towards their students, which can also have some influences on students’ state of mind and learning results. This research will analyze teachers’ instructions from their function types and their different affects on students’ learning outcomes.