On Classroom Questioning Strategies And Students' Spoken Competence

Interaction has been playing more and more important role in language research since the early 1970s, when the communicative teaching method was widely applied in language teaching. Questioning is the most common classroom interaction. In each kind of school, teachers spend much time on question-and-answer sessions. Most of the interaction between language teacher and students is through questions. Based on this, the present study attends to research the classroom questioning strategies and its influence on students' spoken competence. The author designed to carry out an experiment in two classes from Junior Three with different questioning strategies. It lasted for a school term, from Sept. 1, 2003 to Jan. 10, 2004. In the experimental class (EC), the teacher spent much time on asking referential questions, using various types of modification when students failed to answer questions, and providing feedback to invite students' future participation. In the controlled class (CC), the teacher spent much time on asking display questions, providing correct answers or asking another volunteer to answer when students fail to answer.During the experiment, the classroom Teacher-Student interaction was observed, tape-recorded and transcribed. It analyzed the influence on students' immediate oral production by applying different teacher questioning strategies from the micro-level, including teacher's question types, teacher question modification and teacher feedback. Based on this, it investigated the relationship between students' immediate oral production and their interlanguage development (namely, students' spoken competence in this study). SPSS v. 11.0 was used to deal with the data from oral tests.The study reveals that: 1. Students in EC produced nearly three times utterances of those produced in CC and they producedmore sentences on compound sentence level.2. Prompt, decomposition and narrowing are found to be more effective modifications at leading students to enhance comprehensibility and make more oral production.3. Positive feedback with another initiation provides more opportunities for students to apply theirinterlanguage and to stretch their linguistic abilities to the fullest.4. Of the six kinds of negative feedback, direct corrections, prompt and metalinguistic explanations are more useful at pushing students to make successful repair.5. There is no statistically significant difference between EC and CC at spoken competence when the experiment began. However, after the experiment the statistically significant difference between twoclasses does exist, namely students' spoken competence in EC is evidently higher than that in CC.In a word, "Using referential questions in teaching, making various question modification whenstudents fail to answer, and using feedback to encourage students make more output" do have significant influence on improving students' spoken competence.The present thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to why we choose such a topic, and it deals with the importance of questioning strategies and the significance of the present study. Chapter two is a brief review of the research on questioning. Interactionist theories (the psycholinguisitic interactionist theories and the social interactionist theories) are described in Chapter three, for they are the theoretical background of the present study. Chapter four is the central part of the study, consisting of hypotheses, subjects, instruments, experiment procedure, data collection and analyses. The last chapter, Chapter5 is the conclusion section, which is concerned with the major findings, pedagogical implications and limitations of the present study, and suggestions for future research.