A Pragmatic Study Of ESP Teacher's Questioning In Chinese Context

Teacher's questioning, as an essential part of classroom teaching and learning, has long been studied extensively by scholars in different fields and significant insights have been gained through various approaches. However, Verschueren's theory of linguistic adaptation, which offers a more complete and systematic perspective to language research, has not been fully employed to examine the nature of teacher's questioning.This research, drawing on insights from previous literature and the empirical data collected from many ESP classes in Chinese context, proposes a theoretical framework on the basis of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory. Directed by this theoretical framework, the author discusses the questioning strategies prevailing in ESP classes and purports to examine the adaptability of ESP teacher's questioning in the Chinese context. After a detailed analysis of the data coUeted and the strategies summarized, it claims that ESP teacher's questioning, on the one hand, is the result of the adaptation to language structure at lexical level and at overarching level;on the other hand, ESP teacher's questioning is the result of adaptation to contextual correlates.Although there are some limitations in the present research, it has nonetheless its own significance and implications. The present research will help establish a better understanding of the whole questioning process and help the teaching methodologists explain why there exist so many different questioning strategies. It can also give some guidance to those ESP and ELT teachers when they arrange their questioning in class.