Study On EFL Teacher Question Types And Their Effects On Their Students' Output In Class-A Case Study

Since the early 1970s,the approach of communicative language teaching has become more and more popular.The class is characterized by classroom interaction between language teacher and students,and students are taught to communicate meaningfully and successfully.Teacher questions are one of the most frequently used interactive tools,aiming to involve students in the learning process and eliciting thoughtful responses.Much research has been conducted in western world. Comparatively,the study of teacher questioning in China has been relatively new, inadequate and unsystematic.In order to gain a better understanding of how teachers' question types affect students' output in class and provide insights into effective questioning practice for English teaching,the present study attempted to research the effects of teachers' question types on junior high school students' output.The present research was a case study,which investigated two English teachers' questioning behaviors and their students' responses in class at a junior high school in Beijing with data collected in teacher-directed interactions to answer the following questions:1.What is the frequency of different types of questions in regards to closed vs open-ended questions,display vs referential questions,and medium-oriented vs message-oriented questions?2.Will question types affect the amount of students' output in regards to closed vs open-ended questions,display vs referential questions,and medium-oriented vs message-oriented questions? If so,to what extent?3.Will question types affect students' output in regards to syntactic complexity? If so,to what extent?The researcher audio-recorded the classroom discourse.All the audio-recordings were transcribed.Then all the teachers' questions and accordingly the students' responses were classified and analyzed based on the research questions.Additionally, the two teachers were interviewed,and 80 students attending the courses were asked to complete a supplementary questionnaire among which 20 randomly selected students were interviewed,attempting to lend support to the result of the transcript analysis.The major findings are as follows:1) Teachers preferred to ask more closed,display and medium-oriented questions than open-ended,referential and message-oriented questions.2) It seems that there was no difference in the lengths of the students' responses to different types of questions in regards to closed vs open-ended questions,display vs referential questions,and medium-oriented vs message-oriented questions.3) Students' responses to open-ended,referential or message-oriented questions were often syntactically more complex than their responses to closed,display or medium-oriented questions,although they rarely used compound sentences to answer the questions.The findings of the study indicate that open-ended,referential and message-oriented questions were favorable for the syntactical feature of students' output,although there was no significant effect on the amount of students' output.The implication of this research is that English teachers may be trained to increase the use of open-ended,referential and message-oriented questions in teaching to meet the students' need and finally facilitate students' language learning.However,due to the limitations of the research itself,there is still much room for further research regarding the issue.