A Conversational Analytic Study Of Teachers' Questions In College English Class

The study on teachers' questions in the class has been a continuous concern both at home and abroad. Literature review shows that the past study is mainly concerned with question types, which are considered to be closely related with the effectiveness of classroom interaction. But it has often been observed in Chinese college English class that when teachers ask a question without a selection of a specific speaker, no matter which type the question belongs to, the question is always unanswered. This phenomenon indicates that there exist some more significant factors than question types to influence classroom interaction, and to hinder classroom interaction here. So it is of both theoretical and practical significance to conduct a study of these factors. In this dissertation, one such research is reported.The study is conducted in the tradition of spoken discourse analysis. In this field, the Birmingham school represented by Sinclair and Coulthard and the conversation analysis (CA) tradition initiated by Sacks are very influential. The Birmingham school is mainly concerned with the discourse structure while CA puts more emphasis on the social perspective and generative nature of discourse. In this research, the focus is on the reason why the students' turn of silence occurs rather than the structure of a discourse including a silence turn, so CA is adopted as the research method.As suggested by the discussion on the question-answer adjacency pair in CA, when the first speaker produces the first pair part by questioning, he will stop his turn and another speaker is to take the floor by giving a corresponding answer. This finding tells us that the effect of classroom interaction initiated by teachers' questions is not necessarily related with question types, but with conversational rules. Starting from the premise, the dissertation intends to find the conversational rules rooted in conversation itself and culture to explain the lack-of-answer phenomenon in Chinese college English class, rather than to find the question types as the explanation source, as is done by many researches.By a careful analysis of the data collected from 10 teachers from the sixthteaching section of the college English teaching department of Wuhan University, it has been revealed that both teachers and students are oriented to cooperation in the classroom interaction. But because of the influence of the Chinese culture and teaching tradition, teachers' questions also constitute a challenge to students. As the preference organization of AP suggests, the preferred response to a challenge is to avoid, rather than to meet, the challenge. So, owning to the challenging nature of teachers' questions, they are often unanswered. Further study shows that the challenging source of the questions lies in the self-selection required on students by teachers when asking questions. When self-selection is not required in the questioning, as happens in the class when teachers selects a specific student to answer the question or when a collective answer is expected, it always gets answered.By reference to some classroom studies conducted in the western countries, which indicate that, when faced with self-selection, students with different cultural backgrounds show distinct performance, with the Asian students showing the greatest reluctance to answer the teachers' questions, this dissertation points out that the challenging nature of teachers' questions is not universal, but is culture-specific. The Chinese people value harmony, modesty and obedience to authority, and this hinders students from answering teachers' questions immediately in the class.