An Empirical Study On Teachers' Questioning In College EFL Classrooms

In current China, most students learn English from their teachers in classrooms, in that China is still the country in which English is treated as the foreign language. So in EFL situation and teaching, the importance of classroom interaction is self-evident. On the one hand, English teaching happens through a process of live person-to-person interaction. On the other hand, the classroom is a place where interactions of various kinds take place. Among the various kinds of interactions, teacher questioning and student answering is the most important aspect and the subject of this thesis.Classroom questioning is an extensively researched topic. The high incidence of questioning as a teaching strategy, and its consequent potential for influencing student learning, have led many investigators to examine relationships between questioning methods and student achievement and behavior.EFL teachers' questions can give the students impetus and opportunity to produce comfortable language without having to risk initiating language themselves. They can serve to initiate a chain reaction of teacher-student interaction and give the instructor immediate feedback about student comprehension. EFL teachers' questions also provide students with opportunities to find out what they think by what they say. These all require EFL teachers to manipulate the questioning behavior artfully.In addition to its long history and demonstrated effectiveness, questioning is also of interest to researchers and practitioners because of its widespread use as a contemporary teaching technique. Many researches have already indicated that questioning is second only to lecturing in popularity as a teaching method and that classroom teachers spend anywhere from thirty-five to fifty percent of their instructional time conducting questioning sessions.This thesis is concerned with the answering and asking of questions in college-level courses, which focuses on the following aspects: (1) the frequency of display questions and referential questions, (2) the questioning strategies, (3) distribution of teachers' questions and (4) wait-time when questioning. It makes suggestions regarding questioning techniques that are appropriate for lecture classes.The thesis consists of eight chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction of the whole study. The author states the importance of teacher questioning, objective and significance of the study. The second chapter is concerned with the theoretical background of teacher questioning. Firstly, this chapter presents the definition of teacher questioning. Teacher questioning can be regarded as an interactive process, which aims to involve students in the learning process and elicit thoughtful responses. Afterwards, the author makes further exploration into questioning, including the classification of classroom questions, forms and functions of teachers' questions, questioning strategies, distribution of questions and wait-time research.Chapter Three makes full explanation of the methods adopted in the study. Aslinguistic study, it is required to be scientific and reasonable. The empirical study is conducted among six English teachers who take over academic courses of non-English majors. In addition, the author also conducts a questionnaire to probe into the students' attitudes towards classroom questioning. Both the teachers and the students share the same native language—Chinese. In Chapter Four, the author presents research results: EFL teachers ask more display questions than referential questions to much extent, students are not given enough wait-time to think about answers when asked, the distribution of questions is not well-balanced.According to the data, the author makes an analysis of results in Chapter Five, which can be explained based on the following aspects. Meanwhile, the author in Chapter Six also proposes some advice. In Chapter Seven, the author also admits a certain degree of limitations in the study, which deserve attention in future research. Chapter Eight is the concluding part. The author reviews the results of the empirical study and the ideas and suggestions that have been proposed in the thesis, meanwhile, points out the importance of teacher questioning and the current problems inherent within EFL teachers' questioning require us to manipulate the techniques in a more effective and efficient way. However, due to the author's limited knowledge, lack of teaching experience and the limitation of the research itself, there is still some room for the topic of teacher questioning to be discussed and researched.