A Case Study Of Teachers' Questioning In English Classroom At A Middle School

Classroom questioning has been traditionally viewed as an important constituent of teacher talk in classroom context. Teacher questioning, as one of the teacher initiating activities, could facilitate students'language acquisition by asking questions and initiating responses from students. As Nunan have indicated that classroom questioning plays an extremely important role in teaching, especially good questioning can induce students "rich language outputs, involves students in classroom activities, and promote interactions between students and teachers in the target language." Meanwhile, it is generally acknowledged that teacher questioning is closely related to the following aspects:the types of questions, ways of response and feedback based on Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) pattern. Therefore, it is crucial for English teacher to get effective strategies of questioning and feedback.In present research, the author took first videos during the classes on two English teachers' lessons by video camera, and then made transcription on their class teaching records. The purpose of the research is to make a case study on the questioning pattern of two English teachers (One set is a teacher with 17-year teaching experiences; another is a student teacher with little experience) in English interactive classroom at a middle school, and conclude some implications for new teacher. In detail, two sets of teacher questions were looked into to find out the types of teacher questions, the way of response and feedback used by teachers by means of classroom observation and transcribing classroom recordings based on IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) pattern to know the situation of two teachers'classroom questioning and to develop some effective questioning and feedback strategies for new teacher. The finding showed that:(1) the proportion of display questions found in this study is rather high compared with referential questions in two sets of teachers; (2) The data showed that the experienced teacher was better than student teacher at employing the ways of answering questions except for quite small number of individual voluntary respondents; (3) In terms of feedback, the findings showed that there was a balanced use among various kinds of feedbacks in the experienced teacher's lesson. But nearly half of questions were not given feedbacks in two teachers'lessons. In addition, the feedback language the two teachers used in class was quite common or simple; (4) As far as questioning techniques were concerned, the experienced teacher did better than the student teacher. In a word, the experienced teacher was better at employing teacher questioning strategies for interaction than was the student teacher.Based upon the findings, this study recommends that:English teacher, first of all, should make a balanced choice between display questions and referential questions. In addition, the teacher should make their efforts to create an ease classroom atmosphere to stimulate students to response to the questions positively and voluntarily. At last but not least, English teacher should realize the significance of feedback, and become good at praising students and evaluating responds with different language and various feedback strategies.