A Study Of Teachers' Questioning In College EFL Listening Classroom

As China is now still the country in which English is treated as the foreign language, most students learn English from their teachers in classrooms. So classroom interaction is crucially important in EFL situation and teaching. Among the various kinds of interactions, teacher questioning and student answering is the most important aspect and the subject of this thesis.Questioning is an important part of classroom teaching, a way of communication for the teachers to input, to deliver and to share information. Many researches have already indicated that questioning is second only to lecturing in popularity as a teaching method and that classroom teachers spend almost thirty-five to fifty percent of their instructional time conducting questioning sessions.Thus, this paper focuses on teachers'questioning activities in college English listening classroom, aiming to find some basic disciplines and practical techniques useful for teaching of listening. Based on the analysis of the data obtained from observing and interviewing 10 English teachers in three Colleges in Hebei, the paper tries to apply these findings in two classes with the same English level. Then, through comparing the final term scores of listening, the paper manages to provide some new thoughts for the college English teaching of listening.The thesis consists of six parts. The first part is a brief introduction of the whole study. The author states the importance of teacher questioning, objective and significance of the study. Then the following part is the first chapter which is concerned with the theoretical background of teacher questioning, with Input theory and Constructive model as the framework. The next chapter gives a comprehensive review of the studies of questioning. Firstly, this chapter presents the definition of teacher questioning. Afterwards, the author makes further exploration into questioning, including the classification of classroom questions, forms and functions of teachers' questions, questioning strategies, distribution of questions and wait-time research.Chapter Three makes full explanation of the methods adopted in the study. The empirical study is conducted among ten English teachers who take over listening courses of non-English college majors. In addition to class observation, the author also conducts an interview to probe into the teachers'and students'attitudes towards classroom questioning. In Chapter Four, the author presents research results: EFL teachers ask more display questions than referential questions to much extent in listening, and students are not given enough wait-time to think about answers when asked, and then, the distribution of questions is not well-balanced. According to the data, the author makes an analysis of results. The last part is the concluding part. The author reviews the results of the empirical study and the ideas and suggestions that have been proposed in the thesis, meanwhile, points out the importance of teacher questioning and the current problems inherent within EFL teachers' questioning requiring us to manipulate the techniques in a more effective and efficient way. However, due to the author's limited knowledge, lack of teaching experience and the limitation of the research itself, there is still some room waiting to be improved. So in Chapter Seven, the author also admits a certain degree of limitations in the study, which deserves attention in future research.