English Teachers’ Questioning Strategies In Classroom

In the field of foreign language teaching and learning, questioning has been believed as themost frequently used strategy by teachers. The success of a lesson largely depends on theefficiency of questions that the teacher asks. So questioning has always been the focus ofclassroom research both abroad and at home. At present, the frequency of questioning types, waittime, distribution and feedback are always the topics in the questioning research. But researches onthe questioning talk from the functional perspective are relatively rare. And this phenomenon isapparent in domestic research. Based on the previous researches, this thesis explores the linguisticfeatures of teacher questioning discourse from the systemic-functional perspective, trying to showthe role of questioning in the meaning negotiation of classroom teaching process.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one is a brief introduction to the research background, providing the significance ofthe study and the organization of this thesis. It demonstrates why teacher questioning discouse ischosen as the research object, and the research purpose and research method are also presented inthis part.Chapter two is the literature review, which presents the previous studies on classroomquestioning both abroad and at home. It gives an overview of the current situation of questioningresearch, pointing out that although many achievements has been made in domestic research, it isstill insufficient to study the teacher questioning discourse from the functional perspective. That iswhy the functional approach is selected to study the teacher questioning discourse.Chapter three is the theoretical background, mainly introducing the key notions of systemic-functional grammar. The functions that language serves can be grouped into three categories:ideational, interpersonal and textual, which are called the metafunctions. The ideationalmetafunction is realized grammatically by the system of transitivity and the system of logico-semantic relations; the interpersonal by the system of mood the system of modality; the textual bythe system of theme and the system of cohesion. For functional theorists, the meaning of alanguage is the function that it serves in use. These meanings are realized by the functionalgrammar. Thus the relation of realization is formed between the lexico-grammar and semantics. So the bottom-up approach-that is, from wording to context-is adopted as the analysis procedure inthis thesis.Chapter four is the core part of this thesis. It makes a functional analysis of the excellentEnglish teacher questioning discourse. To make this study be enlightening, an excellent Englishteacher questioning discourse has been chosen for the analysis. Influenced by the threemetafunctions, the analysis of teacher questioning discourse is conducted from the correspondingaspects: ideational analysis, interpersonal analysis and textual analysis. Detailed analysisprocedures can be summarized as follows:(1) Systemic functional grammar is deployed to analyzethe teacher questioning clauses.(2) A simple numerical statement of grammatical structures will bemade according to the times they appear in the teacher questioning discourse.(3) Lastly, the role ofthese grammatical structures in the context of classroom will be discussed. For it is an analysis ofan excellent English teacher questioning discourse, these frequently appeared grammaticalstructures are believed to make contributions to the meaning negotiation between teacher andstudent. So according to their different functions, they are named ideational strategies,interpersonal strategies and textual strategies.Chapter five is the conclusion. It summarizes the three different questioning strategies asfollows:(1) Ideational strategy includes the transitivity strategy and logico-semantic strategy.These strategies not only enable the teacher to glimpse into the minds of students, but also enablestudents to easily interpret the teacher’s priorities and directions.(2) Mood metaphor, modalitymetaphor and using interactants as subject are all included into interpersonal strategy. The methodsmentioned above lead to the change of wordings of teacher questioning discourse. And the changeof wordings results in the change of relationship between teacher and student. So the relationshipbetween teacher and student gets to be negotiated. The distance between them is shortened. Therelationship of unequal power is weakened. Thus the interaction in classroom goes forwardsmoothly.(3) Cohesive devices and theme markedness are incorporated in textual strategies. Withthese strategies, the teacher questioning discourse can be expressed in a coherent manner, andstudents can easily infer what meanings are prioritized in the text.Findings of the thesis have both theoretical and practical implications. This thesis is anapplication of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and gets something useful for the teachingpractice. It demonstrates the explanatory power of systemic functional grammar. The teacherquestioning strategies proposed in this thesis are of practical implications to the English classroomteaching.