| Since the old times,questioning is regarded as one of the influential teaching act because of its potential to stimulate students' thoughts,feelings or ideas.It is almost impossible to think of any specific teaching technique which is used more frequently by teachers than questioning in an interactive class.In the "learner-center" teaching mode, classroom questioning plays a more and more important role.Ellis(1994,1997) sums up the role of teacher questioning in Second Language Acquisition.He believes that teacher questioning can control the whole classroom interaction.Many studies,which have been done on classroom questions home and abroad,mainly deal with the categorizations,functions,techniques,strategies,etc.These studies are mainly concerned with primary schools,middle schools,or universities,as for High Vocational and Technical Colleges,there are few researches.While with the development of our country, High Vocational Education is a newly developed education form in our country.There are many unsatisfactory problems of teacher questioning in High Vocational and Technical Colleges:the academic degrees of the teachers are much lower than that of in common universities;the students have very poor academic background;they are lack of learning motivation and self-confidence.Many of them have the idea of giving up their English learning,although English is very important for them which will be widely used after their graduation.The research on the High Vocational Education has its unique and requirement.Therefore,in order to ameliorate this state in High Vocational and Technical Colleges, within the theoretical framework of Krashen's Input Hypothesis,Long's Interaction Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis the researcher adopted some ways to reflect the problems in EFL classroom,explore the characteristics of teacher questioning and the factors which affect learners' responses to teacher questions and put forward some suggestions to facilitate English teaching in High Vocational and Technical Colleges.Observation and questionnaire are used in this study as instruments to collect the data. Tape-record is used to analyze the current state of teacher questioning in EFL classroom:the ratio of display questions is far more higher than referential questions,especially some individual teachers;teachers do not make good use of questioning strategies;more wait-time is needed to answer high-level questions;simple positive feedbacks are frequently employed. A questionnaire is conducted to probe into the factors which affect students' responses:as for teacher's questioning behavior,more improvement should be made in teacher questioning strategies;students answer questions with great anxiety or prefer to keep silence when they are not sure their answers are right,at the same time,they are not willing to cooperate in EFL class and not active in classroom interaction.Some of the factors we may have neglected,or even have never reckoned before.To employ the effective techniques which may optimize the English questioning activities and improve classroorn teaching in High Vocational and Technical Colleges, English teachers ought to be trained to increase the use of referential questions in teaching as well as a certain number of managerable questions,apply questioning strategy appropriately and give effective feedback,create good classroom atmosphere,adopt an affective manner of questioning to cultivate their self-confidence to encourage students to make more output and facilitate their English learning.With regard to teachers' questioning behavior in EFL class, the researcher puts forward some suggestions and implications in the three processes of teacher questioning:what to question;how to guide students to answer;how to evaluate.However,due to the researcher's limited knowledge,limitation of the research itself which is investigated within only one college,there is still some room for the topic of teacher questioning to be further discussed and researched.
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