Study On EFL Teacher Questioning And Its Effect On Their Students' Oral Production In Class

Since the early 1970s, the approach of communicative language teaching has become more and more popular. One of its major principles is that students are taught to communicate, and the class is characterized by classroom interaction between language teacher and students. Teacher questioning is one of the most frequently used interactive processes, aiming to involve students in the learning process and eliciting thoughtful responses. Therefore, the present study attempted to research teacher questioning in Chinese EFL teaching context to find out its features and its influence on students' oral production in class.The subjects involved in this research were six randomly selected English teachers and their students at BIGC (Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication). The present study was conducted with a view to revealing the characteristics of teachers' questioning behaviors from four aspects: question types, questioning strategies, wait-time after teachers' questions and teacher feedback, and how teachers' questioning practices affect students' oral production in class. The author made observations of the classroom activities and audio-recorded the classroom discourse. All the audio-recordings were transcribed. Then all the teachers' questions and accordingly the students' responses were classified and analyzed based on the four aspects mentioned above. Additionally, 140 randomly selected students attending the courses offered by the six teachers and altogether 30 English teachers including the six teacher subjects were asked to complete a supplementary questionnaire, attempting to lend support to the results of the transcript analysis. The findings were summarized as follows:1) Teachers preferred to ask more display questions than referential ones.2) Teachers did not make good use of questioning strategies. Of the four strategies, self-explaining was mostly used by the six teachers, which proved less effective than prompting and probing.3) With the issue of wait-time research in class, generally, most teachers formed a habit of not giving their students enough time (less than five seconds) to think about the response after raising a question.