Research On The Scaffolding Assistance Of Teacher Questioning In English Intensive Reading Class

As a prominent feature of classroom talk, teacher questioning in the secondlanguage teaching environment is the most basic tool that teachers use to organize theclass, stimulate interaction, arouse students’ interest, and examine students’understanding. Therefore, teacher questioning has attracted the attention of manyresearchers for decades.However, the existing research on classroom teacher questioning is mainlyfocused on the type of questions, distribution of questions, and questioning wait-time,little research explores the scaffolding assistance of teacher questioning from theperspective of Social Constructivism theory. Aiming to examine how questions areused to guide students’ language development and better off the classroom interaction,the present thesis makes an empirical investigation of teacher questioning in theEnglish intensive reading class of English majors in a university of Jiangxi Provinceby using the methods of observation and interview based on previous researchfindings of teacher questioning and scaffolding theory at home and abroad.In this study, three English teachers and their students (a total of106sophomoreEnglish majors) were selected randomly as the subjects. The author observed andrecorded a total of18classes of English intensive reading (6classes of each teacher)with each class session of50minutes. The recordings were transcribed and thescaffolding features of teacher questioning were coded based on the typicalcategorization proposed by Wood et al.(1976). Discourse analysis approach was usedto analyze teachers’ questioning behaviors and their effects on teacher-studentinteraction. Interview with teachers was adopted as a supplementary research tool.The qualitative method and quantitative method were combined in the study toexplore the following questions:1) What are the effects of question types on students’ language learning?2) What are the effective questioning modification strategies and their effects onteacher-student interaction?3) What is the scaffolding assistance of teacher questioning and its effects onstudents’ language learning? The findings of the present study are as follows. First, the majority of thequestions provided by the teacher are still the display questions. However, comparedwith the former research results, the share of the referential questions is moderatelylarger. The present study also finds that not all the referential questions can reallyelicit both longer and syntactically more complex responses. Rather, teachers’questioning modification strategies play more important roles than question types ineliciting student’s responses.Second, four kinds of questioning modification strategies in the three teachers’classes are identified: repetition, rephrasing, prompting, and probing. Among them theteachers adopt the most is probing, which is effective to stimulate teacher-studentinteraction. Next to the probing is the repetition, which is used when teachers findtheir students feel difficult to respond or their attention is not concentrated. Promptingis also often used which can lead the students to complete the problem by simplifyingthe questions. Rephrasing is the least strategy the teachers use.Third, during the teacher-student interaction, teachers do provide students withscaffolding questions to help negotiate and construct their language knowledge, whichmake learners’ participation in the classroom activities became more dynamic. Thescaffolding assistance that teacher questioning mostly serves as is DM (DirectionMaintenance). Next to DM is RDF (Reduce the Degree of Freedom). And then is R(Recruitment), MCF (Marking Critical Features), and D (Demonstration). Teacherquestioning usually does not serve the scaffolding feature of FC (Frustration Control).The large proportion of the scaffolding feature—D, MCF, and D indicates that theteacher-student interaction is actually controlled by the teacher who still plays adominant role in the EFL class. The dominant role of the teacher is presented byteachers’ inadequate use and excessive use of scaffolding.According to the findings, a number of implications can be drawn for EFLteaching:1) teachers should pay attention to the design of questions based onstudents’ current language level and their personalities;2) teachers should make betteruse of questioning modification strategies to elicit response from students;3) teachersshould make the students be aware of the importance of interaction in the classroomand encourage them to take part in the classroom interaction.