Study On Teacher Questioning And Its Effect On Students’answer In Efl Classroom

The questioning is one of the most widely used techniques in the teachers’repertoire, and asking-and-answering behaviors among teachers and students areubiquitous phenomena in college English classrooms, which create communicativeopportunities to enrich classroom activities. The present research focuses on threedimensions of teacher questioning, question type, questioning strategy and wait time,and aims to explore how students’ oral production affected by teacher questioning.149non-English major students and their teacher from Engineering andTechnology College, HBUT were selected as the research subjects. Instruments used tocollect the data were: language proficiency tests, classroom observations andaudio-recordings. Before the observations, the tests were taken by all the studentsubjects to determine their English language proficiency which was used in groupdividing. Then, the classroom observations and audio-recordings were conductedcontinuously for a month to collect all the first-hand data for the use of analysis. All theverbal information recorded was transcribed into words and classified accordingly forthe purpose of being analyzed by SPSS.The findings of this study may be summarized as follows：the questioningstrategies used in the EFL teacher are effective to reach students’ answer, with thestrategy of redirecting most effective. But, there is no significant difference between thetwo groups’ answer when the teacher employs the display questions. And then, Thestudents’ oral replies to referential questions are usually longer and syntactically morecomplex, while their replies to display questions are usually shorter and syntacticallyless complex. At last, increasing the wait time appropriately(wait time of more than5seconds) has positive influence on students’ reply, but decreasing wait time willapparently hinder the lower-level students’ oral replies.Based on this study, we have found that the three dimensions of teacherquestioning simultaneously exert influences on students’ answer but maybe at differentlevels. The question type is at linguistic level, which has more influence on students’cognitive comprehension and linguistic expression. The questioning strategy functionsare at psychological level, which has more influence on students’ motivation, attitude,etc. And the wait time exerts influence on students’ answer at operational level, whichprovides students with time for preparation.The method of naturalistic observation is used in this study to ensure the observingsubjects in their natural environment. The disadvantages of naturalistic observation inthis study is that it has only researched the influence of teacher questioning on answerof the class as a whole, lacking the evidence to explain how teacher questioning exertsinfluence on individual students.