A Study On Teacher Questioning In College English Class From The Perspective Of Socio-cultural Theory

Teacher questioning has been traditionally viewed as important methods of foreign language classroom teaching. And a lot of scholars at home and abroad have done researches on teacher questioning. However, in China, not many researches have been done into teacher questioning from the perspective of Socio-cultural Theory.The subjects involved in this research are six randomly selected English teachers and their students in Southwest University. The present study is conducted with a view to revealing the characteristics of teachers' questioning behaviors from four aspects: questioning types, questioning patterns, questioning strategies and teacher feedback. The author makes observations of the classroom activities and audio-recorded the classroom discourse. All the audio-recordings are transcribed. Then all the teacher questions and accordingly the students responses are classified and analyzed based on the four aspects mentioned above. Additionally, the six teacher subjects are interviewed after class and more than 200 students attending the courses offered by the six teachers are asked to complete a supplementary questionnaire, attempting to lend support to the result of the transcript analysis. The findings are summarized as follows:1) Teachers prefer to ask more display questions than referential ones. 2) The 'teacher initiation-student response-teacher feedback' (IRF) pattern is still prevalent in the EFL classroom, from which students benefit less.3) Teachers do not make good use of questioning strategies. Of the four strategies, self-explaining and redirecting are mostly used by the six teachers, which are proved less effective than prompting and probing.4) Teachers adopt more positive feedback than negative feedback.According to the findings, it is easy to find that in order to encourage students to involve in the classroom activities teachers pay more attention to students' affective development than cognitive development. This thesis makes a detailed analysis of the results according to Vygotsky's socio-cultural theories, suggests that teachers should make questioning in students' zone of the proximal development (ZPD), and play a role of scaffolding and mediator, and then it provides some implications and guidelines to English teachers concerning how to improve students' cognitive development in ZPD and how to strengthen the effect of classroom interaction.However, due to the author's limited knowledge, lack of teaching experience and limitation of the research itself, there is still some room for the topic of teacher questioning to be discussed and researched.