The Effects Of Teacher Questioning On Students’ Oral Output In Junior Middle School English Classroom

Nunan points out that teacher talk plays a key role not only in classroom organization but also in learning and inputting process.As a central component of teacher talk,teacher questioning is the main source of students’ input.In Brock’s mind,teacher questioning greatly influences the quality and quantity of students’ oral output.Reasonable use of classroom questioning can effectively promote both the communicative competence and the second language learning.Though most researchers have repeatedly stressed the importance of teacher questioning,tricky problems still remain in learning and communication.For instance,most studies are still based on the theoretical level,and most of the researches are still carried out in universities or high schools,while others pay scant attention to the middle school.Therefore,under the guidance of the Input Hypothesis,Interaction Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis,and conducted from the two dimensions of question types and questioning strategies at the same time,this paper mainly discusses the influence of classroom questioning of junior middle school English teachers on the oral output of students.Meanwhile,based on the functions of teacher questioning and the research participants,this research focuses on display questions and referential questions proposed by Long & Sato’s classification of teacher questioning.Both of them play the important role in junior middle school English classes.However,display questions may initiate students’ basic cognitive activities,while referential questions are able to initiate more complex,thoughtful and longer oral English output of students.Secondly,this paper attempts to further discuss prompting,probing and repeating strategies of teacher questioning,which possess higher occurrence rates and bigger degree of relations with students’ oral output.Besides,they are proposed by Eggen & Kauchak,Jacobsen,and Tsui.Then,the research participants are three randomly selected English teachers and 147 students at NO.1 Experiment Middle School Attached to Sichuan Normal University of Jinjiang district in Chengdu.By classroom observation and audio recording,questionnaire,and interview,this research mainly focuses on the following five questions: 1.What’s the proportion of display questions and referential questions at different English teachers’ classes? 2.What’s the proportion of prompting,probing and repeating strategies at different English teachers’ classes? 3.What are students’ attitudes and preferences to different types and strategies of English teacher questioning? 4.What’s the effect of different question types and questioning strategies on the amount and syntactic characteristics of students’ oral output? 5.What solutions can be applied to improve the questioning skills of teachers,so as to enhance the communicative competence of students?In aid of the SPSS to analyze the data obtained,the research results are summarized below: firstly,the total average usage rate of display questions and referential questions in three teachers’ classes amounts to 53.6% and 46.4% respectively.Secondly,over 80% of students say that reference questions are more practical,so as to enhance their interpersonal skills.Thirdly,in practical teaching,due to the limited class time,if students cannot answer the question smoothly or their answers are incomplete,teachers may choose to repeat the question,and overlook the long-term growth of prompting and probing.Nevertheless,students would like to get more opportunities to answer questions,especially for the personal and specific questions.As for the wrong or incomplete answers,they expect teachers to provide them with guiding questions.Therefore,teachers need to take students’ needs and emotions into full consideration and provide “student-centered” questions,combined with the higher level questioning strategies consciously to create more opportunities for students’ oral output.Finally,some practical suggestions to the actual teaching are presented.In the meantime,this thesis analyzes the enlightenments and limitations of the study in the end.