Use Of Teacher Questions In EFL Reading Class Of Senior Grades At Changshun Minzu Senior High School

Use of teacher questions in English as a foreign language classroomis widely accepted as a teaching and learning tool and it has beenintegrated into English daily teaching and learning as a foreign language.Appropriate teacher questions not only affects teachers’ teaching butinfluences learners’ learning. Good questions provide teachers not justwith evidence about what their students can do, but also with whatteachers need to do next to motivate students’ further thinking andlearning. A teacher question is also a major interaction between theteacher and the students in class. Many studies mainly concentrate on thetypes of questions, wait-time after teachers’ questions and teachers’feedback, only little information shows that just a few scholars maderesearch on how teacher use effective question to improve students’language learning. In order to add some information to this area, thepresent study attempts to investigate teacher question types, the effect ofteacher’s gender and teaching years on teacher questions, and therelationship between teacher questions and students’ learning based onthe input and output hypothesis theories in English as a foreign languageEnglish reading classes in Changshun Minzu Senior High School.In the present study, English as a foreign language English readingclasses in Changshun Minzu Senior High School were observed by the researcher. Classroom observation and questionnaire for students wereused as research instruments to record and to check teacher questions andstudents’ behaviors. Interview with teachers was also used as a researchinstrument to find out teacher’s concepts on teacher questions. Besides,an experiment was done to figure out the relationship between teacherquestions and students’ English reading comprehension.The quantitative method and qualitative method were used to findout the effect of teacher questions on students’ learning. The final resultshows that:1) English teachers tend to ask display questions in English asa foreign language reading class. And teacher’s questions can vary inrelation to their gender and their teaching years.2) Teachers’ wait-time isadequate.3) Some questioning strategies were used in English as aforeign language reading classes.4) The teacher questions can improvestudents’ reading comprehension learning. The findings suggested thatEnglish teachers should pay more attention to the use of teacher questionsin their teaching. But it is not an easy work for teachers to do so for somereasons. Thus the researcher put forward the necessity for teachers’in-service professional training and how to ask question effectively inteaching and some suggestions on the improvement of teacher questions.