A Comparative Analysis Of Teacher Questioning In EFL Classes Of Different Educational Levels

Teacher talk is an integral part of classroom teaching and a major source of target language input for students.In classroom,teacher questioning,the most essential constituents of teacher talk,runs through the whole teaching process.Though researchers have carried out extensive research on classroom questioning,most of the studies focused on college English classrooms and few investigated teacher questioning at primary and middle schools.Even fewer studies compared teacher questioning in EFL classes of different educational levels.This is not conducive to form a comprehensive understanding of EFL classes,nor is it beneficial for the analysis of the actual use of teacher questioning in EFL classes of different educational levels.Against this background,this thesis,by combining a qualitative and quantitative method,investigated the teacher questioning in EFL classes in senior high schools,junior high schools and primary schools under the framework of Interaction Hypothesis,with the hope of providing some guidelines for foreign language teaching.In order to study the teacher questioning in EFL classes of different educational levels,this study selected two English demonstration classes of three educational levels respectively,i.e.,2 from senior high schools,2 from junior high schools and 2 from primary schools.Through classroom observation and discourse analysis,the study explored the characteristics of teacher questioning in EFL classrooms of three different educational levels from three dimensions: questioning types,questioning strategies,and questioning structuresThe study yields the following major findings:(1)on the whole,the standardized frequencies of teacher questions in English classes of different educational levels do not differ greatly;(2)from the perspective of questioning types,display questions outnumber referential questions at all educational levels,especially in senior high schools and junior high schools;(3)from the perspective of questioning strategies,the use of the prompting and probing strategies increases with the rise of educational levels;in contrast,the use of the redirecting strategy declines with the rise of educational levels and the self-explaining strategy is rarely employed at all educational levels;(4)from the perspective of questioning structures,the classical single IRF three-move structure is the most frequently adopted questioning structure at all educational levels.It is followed by the multi-move IRF structure,which increases as the educational levels rise.There is a scarcity of less than three-move structures in teacher questioning at classrooms.In view of the above analysis,this study could produce the following implications.Teachers should constantly adjust questioning types,change questioning strategies and select questioning structures on the basis of students’ proficiencies so as to improve the effectiveness of teacher questioning and the quality of classroom teaching.In this way,students can get more opportunities to participate classroom activities and receive more effective foreign language input.