A Discourse Analysis Of EFL Classroom Teacher Questioning From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Abstract Ur (2000: 230) put forwards six useful criteria for effective questioning for language teachers as follows:(1) Clarity: do the learners immediately grasp not only what the question means, but also what kind of an answer is required?(2) Learning value: does the question stimulate thinking and responses that will contribute to further learning of the target material? Or is it irrelevant, unhelpful or merely time-filling?(3) Interest: do learners find the question interesting, challenging, stimulating?(4) Availability: can most of the members of the class try to answer it? Or only the more advanced, confident, knowledgeable? (Note that the mere addition of a few seconds'wait-time before accepting a response can make the question available to a significantly larger number of learners.)(5) Extension: does the question invite and encourage extended and /or varied answers?(6) Teacher reaction: are the learners sure that their responses will be related to with respect, that they will not be put down or ridiculed if they say something inappropriate? According to relevance theory, teacher's question must have clarity and make their utterance more ostensive and relevant. The criteria of learning value and interest require that teacher's questions should be provided with new information so that they can interact with the old information in student's cognitive environment and motivate their inspiration. Frankly speaking, the criterion of availability is the relevance of utterance. The best strategy available to teachers is to choose an appropriate and ostensive stimulus which will give rise to the intended effects and which at the same time will involve the least possible effort on the students. The criterion of extension emphasizes that teacher's question should help students to infer from the manifest knowledge and enlarge their communicative ability. And teacher reaction is concerned with teacher's feedback strategies and their modification. When communicative failure or obstacles occurs, teacher should offer more relevant information to guarantee the success of communication and meanwhile save the student's"face".In this paper, the author starts from a classroom observation and transcript to ten English teachers of Grade 2005 in China University of Petroleum, Qingdao campus. Based on the basic principles of Relevance Theory, this paper discusses some issues of teacher questioning from a cognitive pragmatic point of view. The purpose of the analysis is to explore the theoretical explanation for effective questioning and try to lead to significant suggestions for successful classroom interaction.To sum up, classroom interaction is a complex issue which contains various factors of teachers and students. But to teachers, when they ask some questions, they must consider the type of questions to ensure that the information can stimulate the student's cognitive environment. And then, they should make their ways of questioning clearer and more ostensive to convey the valuable information to students. Lastly, they should make some modification and offer the maximally relevant item of information that can yield the greatest possible cognitive effects in return for the smallest possible processing effort.