Exploration Of Teachers' Questioning In College English Classrooms

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 achievements and behaviors EFL teachers' questions can give the students impetus and opportunities 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.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 paper consists of six chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction of the whole study. The second chapter is concerned with the theoretical background of teacher questioning. Chapter Three makes full explanation of the methods adopted in the study. As linguistic 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. 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 Six, the author also admits a certain degree of limitations in the study, which deserve attention in future research. 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.