A Study Of Secondary School Pre-service EFL Teacher Questions

Teacher question is an essential part of teacher talk and has been a focus of different researches.In English classes,proper teacher questions can consolidate the mastery of language,promote the output through interactions and elicit in-depth thinking.For pre-service EFL teachers who aim to find out the problems in their classes and hope to solve them in the teaching practice,it is particularly important to ask reasonable and effective teacher questions.This study took six undergraduate normal school students(pre-service teachers)from the foreign languages college in a normal university as the research subjects to study their teacher questions.The features of the teacher questions asked by the pre-service EFL teachers in the demo classes in their intern secondary schools have been discussed and analyzed.Based on the transcript,the class recordings,the questionnaires,and the after-class evaluations and interviews,the six pre-service EFL teacher questions have been investigated.The research findings are as follows:1.The six pre-service EFL teachers have the awareness of raising questions to motivate students,but the teacher questions in each class are too many.2.The distributions of different types of teacher questions are uneven,with the low-level questions being the least frequently asked and high-level questions being the most frequently asked.3.Two ways that are mainly adopted in the distributions of the six pre-service EFL teachers’ questions are nominating and chorus-answering,but sometimes the teachers answers the questions themselves.4.There are two problems in the feedback of pre-service EFL teachers.One is that the feedback pattern is monotonous with simplistic forms of language,and the other is the lack of follow-ups.5.The intonation of pre-service EFL teachers’ questions lacks variety.Based on relevant theoretical foundations and other research findings,suggestions are put forward to the pre-service EFL teachers and the normal universities.The pre-service EFL teachers should communicate with the tutoring teacher as often as possible and ask them for some advice on teacher questions,renew their teaching concept to ask more thought-provoking questions,prepare detailed teaching plans with possible answers and follow-ups to behave confidently whenfaced with students’ different responses,and improve their speaking competence to interact with students more effectively.The normal university professors should re-develop the textbook to suit the students(pre-service EFL teachers)and the curriculum well,and emphasize the practicality of EFL teaching courses through various kinds of class activities for pre-service EFL teachers to learn how to design questions in class.Besides,normal universities should also hold short-term training for tutoring teachers to ensure their responsibility and professionalism.Teacher questions play significant roles in English teaching.Therefore,secondary school pre-service EFL teachers should constantly improve the quality of questions as well as the effectiveness of the class.