A Study On The Effects Of Teacher Questioning On Students’ Oral Production In Senior High School English Classroom

Proper and effective teacher questioning can promote students’ successful oral production and achieve the goal of cultivating students’ language communicative competence. Therefore, teacher questioning has attracted much attention of many researchers at home and abroad. Among the researches, the majority of researches at abroad focused on different aspects of teacher questioning, while the researches on teacher questioning in China are relatively late, among which the majority of researches put emphasis on teacher questioning in college English classes, especially the reading course. Furthermore, the researches on the relationship between teacher questioning and students’oral production are obviously insufficient, in particular the researches on the relationship between teacher questioning and students’oral production in senior high school English classes are fewer. Therefore, it is necessary for the author to conduct an in-depth research on the effects of teacher questioning on students’oral production.Based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Long’s Interaction Hypothesis, and from the two dimensions of question types and questioning strategies, this study aims to know what is overall state of teachers’ application of question types and questioning strategies in senior high school English classroom, students’ expectations of teachers’employment of question types and questioning strategies and the effects of teacher questioning on students’ oral production. According to the research purposes above, this study proposes three research questions:(1). what is overall state of teacher’s application of question types and questioning strategies in senior high school English classroom? And what kind of question types and questioning strategies do students expect their teacher to employ? (2). what is the frequency and percentage of display questions and referential questions in the observed English classes? And what effects do different types of questions have on students’ oral production? (3). what’s the frequency and percentage of different questioning strategies in the observed English classes? And what effects do different questioning strategies have on students’oral production?The subjects participated in this study were one EFL teacher in senior high school and his 137 students in two classes in Nol Middle School in Jinchang, Gansu. The research instruments used in this study were questionnaire, classroom observation and video recording. The researcher observed twenty English classes of the teacher, among which four lessons were video-recorded. After video recording, the researcher transcribed the four lessons according to the video-recorded materials, then categorized and organized the transcripts from two dimensions of question types and questioning strategies, and analyzed the students’ oral production from the aspects of the length and complexity by means of using SPSS. Besides, the questionnaires were given out to the 137 students the teacher taught. At last, the researcher analyzed all statistics by means of using SPSS and drew the conclusions as follows.Firstly, in senior high school English classes, the teacher is inclined to pose display questions more than referential questions; as for the questioning strategies, the EFL teacher mainly uses four questioning strategy:prompting, probing, self-explaining and redirecting, while among the four strategies, the strategy of self-explaining is in the majority; however, as to the students’ expectations of teacher questioning, the students expect their teacher to pose more referential questions than display questions in English classes and use the strategy of prompting and probing most frequently in English classes.Secondly, the effects of teacher questioning on students’ oral production in senior high school English classes are shown as follows. In terms of question types, both display questions and referential questions can succeed in facilitating students to produce oral productions, however, there is a significant difference between the length and the complexity of students’ oral productions to display questions and referential questions, that is, the students’ oral production to referential questions are much longer in the length and more complicated in the complexity than those of display questions; when it comes to questioning strategies, the four strategies can facilitate students’ oral production, however, students’ oral productions to prompting and probing are much longer in the length and more complex in sentence structure than self-explaining and redirecting, and there is no significant difference between self-explaining and redirecting, that is, the prompting and probing are more helpful to elicit students’ successful oral production.Finally, this study analyzes the pedagogical implications and limitations, then proposes some suggestions for the further research on teacher questioning. On account of some objective factors, author’s limited ability and insufficient teaching experience, there are some shortcomings in this study. Therefore, the issue of the effects of teacher questioning on students’ oral production in senor high school English classes remains to be further research.