A Study Of College English Teachers' Classroom Questioning

Classroom questioning, an important means which teachers apply to stimulate students'language output, is one of the main patterns for teacher-student interaction and plays a very important role in classroom teaching. The researches on the teachers'classroom questioning mainly focus on the description of the teachers'questioning characteristics both at home and abroad. However, there are relatively few studies on college English teachers'questioning and students'expectation towards it in China.Therefore, based on the social interactionism and the social constructive approach, this thesis investigates the college English teachers'classroom questioning and the students'expectation towards teacher questioning through the classroom observation, questionnaires and interviews. The subjects of the study are ten college English teachers and their 302 students from ten non-English major classes in Hunan University. The researcher, as a non-participant observer, listened to 40 periods (1800 minutes), with each teacher 4 periods. The researcher recorded all the periods and took field notes when observing the lessons. This thesis analyzes each teacher's questioning in two periods (90 minutes) from the aspects of types of questions, the way questions answered, questioning strategies, question distribution, wait time and feedback. The ten classes of students filled in the questionnaires after the researcher listened to teachers'classes. Used as the makeup of the questionnaire, the interviews with ten students were conducted in order to understand the students'expectation and needs for the teacher questioning. The interviews with teachers were designed to find out the reasons for their questioning behavior in class.This thesis mainly adopts descriptive qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Through the analysis of the empirical data, the present study has the following findings: 1) In the majority of the teachers'classes, there are more display questions than referential questions; more wh-questions than yes/no questions and more text questions than real questions. However, the students expect that teachers ask more referential and real questions. 2) In the respect of the way questions answered, teachers like volunteers'answering questions most, which is also the way students prefer. 3) The questioning strategy which teachers apply most is the prompting, but students expect teachers to use technique of decomposition more frequently. 4) Teachers usually tend to ask questions to the students sitting in the front or middle of the classroom. Students expect that teachers treat all the students impartially and pay more attention to the students in the corner or at the back when raising questions. 5) Teachers'wait time after asking questions is usually less than 3 seconds. Students expect teachers to prolong wait time in order that they can think about the question to a full extent. 6) Teachers usually offer students positive feedback, which is simple and mechanical, and they seldom offer explicit negative feedback. Students also expect that teachers give more positive feedback, with detailed explanation and comments. Having based on the results of the study, the researcher discusses the effective ways of college English teachers'classroom questioning. Teachers need to raise more referential questions, wh-questions and real questions and keep an appropriate proportion of each kind of question to arouse students'enthusiasm and increase students'oral production; They may ask volunteers to answer questions and at the same time, also consider other students'needs for answering questions; When asking questions, they might treat every student impartially and consider the students sitting at the back or in the corner of the classroom especially; Teachers should wait more time after asking a question and they may use proper questioning strategies and feedback, with explanation and comments in detail.There is some insufficiency of teacher questioning existing in college English classes. According to the findings, the researcher provides some constructive suggestions on teacher development of learning some basic language teaching and learning theories as well as teaching practices. This thesis expects that teachers could raise questions in a more effective way, better promote students'language output and English learning and improve the teacher-student interaction in college English classroom and the college English teaching effect.