An Empirical Study On Teacher’s Questioning In Classroom Of College English

Classroom questioning, an important means which teachers apply to stimulate students’language output, is one of the main patterns for teacher-student interaction and plays a veryimportant role in classroom teaching. The researches on the teachers’ classroom questioningmainly focus on the description of the teachers’ questioning characteristics both in China andabroad. However, there are relatively few studies on college English teachers’ questioningand students’ expectation towards it in China.Therefore, based on the output hypothesis and constructivism, this thesis investigates thecollege English teachers’ classroom questioning and the students’ expectation towards teacherquestioning through the classroom observation, questionnaires and interviews. The subjectsof the study are four college English teachers and their150students from four non-Englishmajor classes in Hebei Medical University. The researcher, as a non-participant observer,listened to8periods (400minutes), with each teacher2periods. The researcher recorded allthe periods and took field notes when observing the lessons. This thesis analyzes eachteacher’s questioning in two periods (100minutes) from the aspects of types of questions,questioning strategies, wait time and feedback. The four classes of students filled in thequestionnaires after the researcher listened to teachers’ classes. The interviews with teacherswere designed to find out the reasons for their questioning behavior in class.This thesis mainly adopts descriptive qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis.Through the analysis of the empirical data, the present study has the following findings:1)Inthe majority of the teachers’ classes, there are more display questions than referentialquestions. However, the students expect that teachers ask more referential and realquestions.2) The questioning strategy which teachers apply most is the redirecting.3)Teachers’ wait time after asking questions is usually about3seconds. Students expectteachers to prolong wait time in order that they can think about the question to a full extent.4)Teachers usually offer students positive feedback, which is simple, and they seldom offerexplicit negative feedback. Students also expect that teachers give more positive feedback,with detailed explanation and comments.Based on the results of the study, the researcher discusses the effective ways of college English teachers’ classroom questioning. Teachers need to raise more referential questions,keep an appropriate proportion of each kind of question to arouse students’ enthusiasm andincrease students’ oral production; Teachers should wait more time after asking a questionand they may use proper questioning strategies and feedback, with explanation and commentsin detail. There is some insufficiency of teacher questioning existing in college Englishclasses. According to the findings, the researcher provides some constructive suggestions onteacher development of learning some basic language teaching and learning theories as wellas teaching practices. This thesis expects that teachers could raise questions in a moreeffective way, better promote students’ language output and English learning and improve theteacher-student interaction in college English classroom and the college English teachingeffect.