Effects Of Teachers' Questions On Fluency, Accuracy And Complexity In The Oral English Production Of China's College Students

Teachers' questions have been traditionally viewed as important methods of foreign language classroom teaching. And a lot of scholars at home and abroad have done researches on the classification and function of teachers' questions. However, in China, not many researches have been done into the effects of teachers' questions on College English students' oral English production.Fluency, accuracy and complexity of EFL learners' oral performance have been the goals of spoken English teaching. For decades, a lot of foreign scholars have been carrying out researches on fluency, accuracy and complexity and they have reached important findings. However, up till now, quantitative researches into these three areas are rare in China, while the need of improving College English students' oral English performance is increasing enormously.The present study investigates into the effects of teachers' questions on fluency, accuracy and complexity in the oral English production of China's College English students. Thus, the first part of this thesis is fourfold and reviews: 1) relevant researches on teachers' questions; 2) Input Hypothesis; 3) task-based language learning and teaching—the classroom model in this study; 4) the previous researches on language performance (fluency, accuracy and complexity).Then the thesis presents an experimental spoken English course given to 60 second-year non-English majors in Soochow University. Among them, 30 experimental participants are given lessons with the teacher's questions while the other 30 participants form the control group. And both a pre-test and a post-test are involved.After a discussion of the quantitative and qualitative results of the experiment, this study finds that teachers' questions, especially referential questions, have great effects on fluency, accuracy and complexity of the students' oral speech production. In view of the findings, this thesis further proposes that the future relevant researches may be focused on concrete and systematic questioning strategies and on the cognitive process of teachers' questions affecting students' oral English production.