A Study Of The Effects Of Teacher Questioning On Students' Oral English Production In EFL Classes In Senior High School

Teacher questioning is considered to be an important part of teacher talk and an effective teachingskill for the interaction in class between the teacher and his students. Teacher questioning can not onlyserve as the language input for the students, but also provide opportunities for the students to produce theirtarget language. Effective questioning in class helps to produce the rich language output of the students, todevelop their thinking abilities and to promote exchanges between the teacher and his students. Therefore,teacher questioning is one of the effective teaching methodologies and it has long been one of the focusesin the field of language teaching research. Many scholars abroad have conducted researches on teacherquestioning from different angles and their studies have provided much insight into the foreign languageteaching and learning. However, only a few studies have been made in China in regard to teacherquestioning, most of which have centered primarily upon teacher questioning in college English classrooms,but little research has been conducted on teacher questioning in EFL classes in senior high schools. What ismore, few studies are found to focus their researches upon the effects of teacher questioning on theproduction of the students' oral English. As a result of the survey of the previous studies, it is of necessityto carry out a research on teacher questioning in EFL classes in senior high schools.The present study, based upon the survey of the previous studies on teacher questioning, aims toreveal the major features of teacher questioning in English classes at a senior high school from four aspects,including question types, questioning strategies, wait-time and teacher feedback. In addition, this researchattempts to find out the effects of teacher questioning on the students' classroom oral English production.According to the objectives of this study, the researcher proposes two research questions:(1). What are themajor features of teacher questioning in EFL classes in senior high school?(2). What are the effects ofteacher questioning on students' oral English production in EFL classes in senior high school?Based upon the research objectives and research questions, this study selects a key senior highschool in Xuchang City, Henan Province as a case study. The major research methods include classroomobservation, audio-recording and questionnaire survey. Six English teachers are selected as the subjects ofclassroom observation and audio-recording. The lessons of the six teachers are audio-recorded, one wholeclass of each teacher is recorded and the lesson type of the six observed teachers is English Reading. The six recorded lessons are transcribed and the researcher makes a systematic analysis of these transcribedmaterials from the above four aspects of questioning. This study also randomly selects another14Englishteachers and180students chosen from the six observed English teachers' classes as the subjects of thequestionnaire survey, which provides a supplementary data for the present study. The major findings of thisstudy are summarized as follows.Firstly, teacher questioning in English classes in the senior high school have its features. Thesefeatures are shown as follows: more display questions are proposed than the referential questions; withinthe four questioning strategies, the observed teachers have a preference for repeating and self-explaining,the employment frequencies of prompting and probing are very low in class; most of the observed teacherscan provide adequate wait-time (more than3seconds) for the students to organize their answers, but thedistribution of wait-time for each question is not reasonable; the observed teachers provide more positivefeedbacks than negative feedbacks and they frequently use some simple positive feedback and recasts totheir students.Secondly, teacher questioning in English classes in the senior high school exert some effects onthe students' oral English production in class. These major effects are revealed as follows: the referentialquestions are more helpful in initiating students' classroom oral English production than the displayquestions; prompting and probing are more effective in eliciting students' successful, longer and morecomplex oral English productions than self-explaining and repeating, and besides, more interactionsbetween teachers and their students are initiated by prompting and probing; students' classroom oralEnglish productions are longer and more complex to the wait-time of more than3seconds than those to thewait-time of less than3seconds; positive feedback with another initiation and metalinguistic feedback aremore useful in initiating students' classroom oral English productions.The present study consists of five chapters.Chapter One is introduction. It first presents the research background, research objectives of thisstudy, and then it lays out the structure of this thesis.Chapter Two is literature review. Firstly, this chapter introduces some definitions and functions ofteacher questioning, and then some distinguished classifications of question types, questioning strategies,wait-time and feedback of teacher questioning abroad are reviewed. Finally it summarizes the previous researches of teacher questioning in China.Chapter Three is the research design. It includes the research questions, research subjects,research methods and the procedures of data collection and analysis.Chapter Four is the analysis of the results, which is the central part of this study. Based on thedata collected by the means of classroom observation, audio-recording and questionnaire survey, this partdisplays and discusses the results of this study.Chapter Five is conclusion. This part first makes a summary of the major findings of this study,which reveals the major questioning features of the English teachers in senior high school and discusses theeffects of teacher questioning on students' classroom oral English productions. In addition, this chapter alsogives some pedagogical suggestions for the English teachers in senior high school in regard to teacherquestioning. Last, it presents the limitations of this study and the prospects for the further research in thisarea.