A Study On Teacher Questioning In The Chinese EFL Classroom

This thesis is intended to expolre the situation of teacher questioning and its correlation with effective language learning in the Chinese EFL classroom. The author starts from introducing seven factors of teacher questioning:1) Forms of teachers'questions: yes/no questions, disjunctive questions, wh-questions and elicitation questions;2) Display and referential questions: the former kind of questions only have one correct answer while the latter kind of questions have more than one answers;3) Discourse patterns of teacher questioning: IRE, IRER, I1R1(InRn)E, and IR1E1(RnEn);4) Teacher questioning strategies: self-explaining, prompting, probing, redirecting;5) Wait-time of teacher questioning: postquestion wait time and postresponse wait time;6) Distribution of teachers'questions: general solicits and specific solicits;7) Cognitive levels of teachers'questions: lower-level and higher-level questions.The research subjects are five classes among the first-year and second-year students of different majors in a university in Northeast China. By means of treating althogether 450 minutes observed classroom teachers'questions and the students'responses, the author concludes her findings from the introduced seven perspectives:1) Wh-questions are the most often used form (65.22%) of EFL teachers'questions;2) EFL teachers ask more display questions (61.13%) than referential questions (35.87%);3) IRE pattern (71.74%) is the dominant discourse pattern;4) EFL teachers do not apply the questioning strategies to all the questions;5) EFL teachers give students more postquestion wait time (1.32s) than postresponse wait time (0.38s);6) During specific solicits in one period of class (90 minutes), only very few of the students (13.89%) have the chances to answer EFL teachers'questions;7) EFL teachers ask more lower-level questions (79.89%) than higher-level questions (20.11%).And then, variables that may play an important role in teacher questioning are analyzed. At last, the author gives some suggestions about teacher questioning, which may result in effective second language learning.