Regulative Discourse In Singapore Primary English Classrooms: Teachers' Choices Of Directives

摘要

Classroom research has largely focused on an 'instructional discourse' in local classroom contexts where teachers and students interact about subject knowledge. Few studies have been conducted, however, to examine 'regulative discourse', which is the precondition for the transmission of subject knowledge. In this article, therefore, we investigate regulative discourse in Singapore primary school English Language classrooms from a perspective of Bernstein's pedagogic discourse theory. Specifically, we identify the typology of teachers' directives with morphosyntactic patterns by using corpus linguistic approach, and explore what choices teachers make of directives, for what regulatory purposes and how they position students. In this way, we illustrate how the regulative discourse is constructed and what power relations are enacted or manifested between teachers and students in the Singapore classroom context. The findings help illuminate relationships between sociocultural factors and classroom regulative practices that enable a better understanding of sociocultural specific rules of order, relation and identity in the classroom context.