大学英语教师课堂请求语使用策略研究——基于某届全国大学英语教学比赛教师课堂语料的分析

A Survey of the Requests Made in Class by Chinese College English Teachers--Based on the Corpus Collected from a National Foreign Language Teaching Contest

本文基于自建教师课堂用语语料库,探究了某届全国大学英语教学比赛获奖教师的课堂请求语使用情况,从言语直接程度和言语修饰策略角度对教师课堂请求语进行分析,并统计了各类策略的使用频率。研究发现:①教师直接型策略的使用明显多于规约型间接策略和非规约型间接策略;②教师使用非修饰策略明显多于言语修饰策略,言语修饰策略主要用于缓和语气。该研究对外语教师通过恰当使用课堂用语提升教学效果具有一定的启示意义。

Requests are attempts on the part of a speaker to get the hearer to perform or to stop performing some kind of action(Ellis,2008).Most researches on requests in the literature focused on the request strategies adopted by the students,while the request strategies by the teachers have not got due attention,especially those in the EFL environment.It is believed that in an EFL environment the teachers’use of language is an important input for EFL learners,so the appropriate use of the target language on the part of the teachers is necessary.This study is to investigate the use of request strategies by Chinese college English teachers in class.Based on a self-built corpus of teaching requests,the study investigated the frequency of the requests made in class by the 10 winners of a National Foreign Language Teaching Contest(listening and speaking group).The corpus was collected from the final contest of the 10 teachers,and the requests in the corpus were manually tagged according to the classification of requests put forward by Blum-Kulka(1989)and Sifianou(1992),which divides requests according to their directness and modification,under the labels of direct strategies,conventional indirect strategies,and non-conventional indirect strategies;and internal modification and external modification respectively.AntConc was used to retrieve the requests from the tagged corpus and statistical analysis was made subsequently with SPSS 17.0.The requesting strategies were analyzed in terms of the classifications aforementioned.Moreover,the frequencies of the strategy types were listed.It was found that(1)More direct strategies were used than conventional indirect strategies and nonconventional indirect strategies;(2)More non modification strategies were adopted in class while some mitigation devices were employed to mitigate the requests.The results show that there are differences between the EFL teachers’request strategies and those of the native speakers,which may be due to the influence of the transfer of the mother tongue and its culture.Besides,the use of more direct strategies is more likely to improve the efficiency of classroom language teaching and learning.This study suggests that teachers should be encouraged to adopt explicit teaching methods,using direct and unmodified strategies more frequently in the communicative activities of foreign language classroom teaching,so that students can easily understand teachers’intensions.The corpus selected in this study comes from teaching competition classes instead of English classes in the daily environment.Under the influence of competition pressure,time limitation and other factors,teachers’use of language strategies may be different from that in daily English classes to a certain extent.In addition,due to the difficulty of corpus selection,the corpus size of this study is comparatively small,which also affects the credibility of the conclusion to some extent.In the future research,we should cover the selection of daily English classroom corpus,and appropriately expand the range and scale of corpus,so as to further verify the conclusion of this study.