| With the widespread application of communicative language teaching (CLT), interaction has attracteduniversal attention. It has been revealed that most of classroom interaction is achieved by questions.Questioning is the most widely applied strategy for teachers to stimulate and sustain interaction. So teacherquestioning has received much research attention for many years. It is against such a background that thestudy on the effects of teacher questioning on students’ oral production is carried out in the perspective ofSLA.By reviewing the related researches abroad and at home, based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Long’sInteraction Hypothesis, Swain’ Output Hypothesis and Scaffolding, combined with teaching practice, theauthor put forward the following research questions from three dimensions: question type, wait time andquestion modification.Question1: What’s the frequency of display questions and referential questions in the observedEnglish classes? And what effects do the two types of questions have on the complexity of students’ oralproduction?Question2: After posing a question, how much wait-time do teachers give to the students’ for theirresponses in the observed English classes? And what effects does the wait-time have on the complexity ofstudents’ oral production?Question3: What question modifications do teachers use in the observed English classes? And whateffects do different question modifications have on the complexity of students’ oral production?The subjects participating in the study were two EFL teachers in Junior Two and their124students inparalleled classes in Weidian Middle school, Qin’an, Tianshui, Gansu. With the research instruments ofvideo recording and questionnaire, the author firstly video-recorded and transcribed two lessons given bythe two teachers, then classified and organized the transcripts from the three dimensions: question type,wait-time and question modification, and analyzed the complexity of SOP (students’ oral production),which was measured by the MLU (mean length of utterance) and sentence structure of SOPs in the study.In addition, questionnaires were delivered to the124student subjects, and totally123valid questionnaireswere collected. After the statistics analysis of all the collected data using SSPS, the major conclusions areas follows:1. In response to question type, it is shown that more display questions are employed by EFL teachers than referential questions. In addition, there exists a significant difference between display questions andreferential questions in terms of the complexity of students’ oral productions. Usually, the students’ oralproductions to referential questions are much longer and more complex in sentence structure than to displayquestions.2. With regards to wait-time, it is shown that more wait-time of less than3seconds is usually given tostudents by EFL teachers after posing questions than that of more than3seconds. However, there is asignificant difference in the complexity of the students’ oral productions between the two periods ofwait-time. The students’ oral productions to the wait-time of more than3seconds are usually longer andmore complex in sentence structure than to that of less than3seconds.3. As far as question modification is concerned, it is indicated that repetition, prompt, decomposition,paraphrase and narrowing are employed in EFL classes. Among all the five question modifications,repetition is the most frequently applied question modification, followed by prompt, while narrowing is theleast applied question modification. In terms of the complexity of the students’ oral productions, there’s nosignificant difference between the four different question modifications such as repetition, prompt,paraphrase and decomposition.Inevitably, there exist some limitations in the study, such as the limited participants, single researchmethod and narrow research focus because of various objective difficulties and inconvenience as well asthe author’s limited ability and energy. However, it might shed some lights on pedagogy and pave the wayfor future research related to teacher questioning in EFL classroom. |
