The Study On Teachers' Questioning In College English Class From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In college English classes, the teacher talk is a typical teacher-student interaction. Recent years, more and more scholars do numerous researches on the study of teacher talk in the class. Teacher talk is one of the key elements to decide the success or failure of teaching, which is not only the instruction of teaching objective, but also the important origin of language. However, questioning takes a great proportion of teacher talk, which plays an extremely crucial role in the process of organizing class and students' language acquisition.Early researchers study on teacher talk and teacher questioning from linguistic and syntactic features. However, the relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson provides a stable theoretical foundation for the study. On this basis of principles of relevance theory, the thesis focuses on the research and analysis of teacher questioning from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics in college English classes, to guide the actual teaching in classroom questioning, which is to examine whether can improve the the success of questioning and the ability of student-teacher interaction in English class.The study uses naturalistic inquiry as my research method, where the researcher studies the phenomenon in natural environment by means of observation, case study and interviews without any intervene in order to know the real teaching process. I recorded all the English class and took notes to understand the genuine teaching process. The study aims to solve the following three key questions:1) At present, is teacher questioning successful in English class, if not, what reasons? 2) Can relevance theory improve the success of teacher questioning in English class? 3) Under the framework of relevance theory, how teachers propose questions to realize the teacher-student interaction?The study has found that:1) At present, teacher questioning is not successful in English class. Display questions are more than referential questions in English class.2) Relevance theory can improve the success of teacher questioning. Teachers can use relevance theory to propose questions when there is no student to answer questions or explain in order to stimulate them.3) Students'cognitive level is different. Teachers should use relevance theory to propose questions.Finally, according to the study, some teaching implications are provided to guide college English class.