A Study Of The Effect Of Teacher Questioning On Interaction In The EFL Class

Foreign Language serves as the teaching media as well as the teaching purpose, which distinguishes foreign language teaching from teaching of any subjects. Teacher language is of vital importance in classroom teaching, not only for the organization of the class, but also for the main source of comprehensible target language input. Therefore, since 70s and 80s of last century, it has gained great attention in the academic world. Focus of the previous researches is widely put on some linguistic and syntactic features. Recently numerous studies in SLA (second language acquisition) have revealed the importance of teacher-student interaction in the language learning. Meanwhile, the role of teacher questioning has become one of the focuses for more and more researchers, as it can initiate and sustain the teacher-student classroom interaction, and create helpful environment and opportunities to exchange information and express thoughts in order to facilitate English learning process and enhance English learning achievement. As a result, at home and abroad researchers have employed the naturalistic inquiry to probe into the existing questioning problems in SLA or EFL (English as a Foreign Language) in terms of categories, distribution, wait-time, feedback, etc, and have provided corresponding suggestions.However, most of the studies just simply list the relevant theories, and are not designed to systematically investigate teacher questioning with an integrated theoretical basis. Thus, at first this thesis tried to unify all the previous theories within the frame of social constructivism and to offer a series of effective questioning techniques. In addition, besides the naturalistic inquiry, the author also used the experimental study method to examine the validity of the above questioning techniques. Non-English majors from 6 classes of a university in Dalian were selected as subjects, who were observed and recorded. According to the descriptive statistic analysis towards the obtained results, the two classes with more problems were chosen as the experimental group, in which the above questioning pattern was adopted by the author and the teaching processes were recorded by a MP4. Then, a comparison on classroom interaction was conducted, in the following aspects: the length of students'answers, the ratio of appropriate answers, initiating questions, etc, which was between the former classroom observation and the latter with the aid of the questioning pattern mentioned above. The result of the comparison, from the practical perspective, proved that the questioning techniques are helpful to facilitating the teacher-student interaction, and improving English teaching.