Teacher Questioning And Its Influence On The Interaction Structure

In recent years, with the wide implementation of the communicative approach, many researches have been done in the field of classroom talk from the perspective of discourse analysis, conversation analysis, etc. Various studies show that to make the classroom genuinely communicative, language teachers need to reduce the 'teacher talk' and leave more class time to students. However, some researchers argue that simply reducing the teacher talk cannot effectively promote genuine classroom communication because students' initiative and active participation in classroom discourse, to a large extent, depend on a productive and effective interaction structure. For this reason, much of the research interest shifts away from the quantity of teacher talk to the quality of teacher talk and classroom interaction structure.Studies with respect to teacher questioning indicate that most of the classroom interaction is done by teachers' asking questions and students' answering questions. Questioning is a dominant technique teachers employ to promote classroom interaction. Besides, under all kinds of classroom constraints, teachers are the ones who tend to dominate the classroom proceedings and they are the authority who can decide who is going to take the turn, when to take the turn, and what to talk about. Students' turn-taking behavior is often affected by the teacher's turn-allocation behavior. Therefore, the improvement of classroom interaction structure depends much on effective teacher questioning and teachers' appropriate turn-allocation strategies in class.Based on Sinclair and Coulthard's IRF classroom interaction structure, turn-taking system and the researches on teacher questioning, this study attempts to explore the characteristics of interaction structure in the context of EFL class in China, and provide some pedagogical implications for EFL teaching.By adopting a descriptive approach in this study, 'natural inquiry' is chosen as the research method, to describe and interpret what is actually happening in the teaching process. The inquiry was conducted with recordings, observations and field notes in ten EFL teachers' English lessons in Zhejiang Normal University. One of the lessons was chosen for a case study. The study explored the three research questions, that is, (1) What are the recurring discourse patterns in the EFL classroom under investigation? (2) What...