A Pragmatic Study On Teacher Questioning

Teacher questioning, one of the most frequently employed teaching techniques, is different from the routine questioning utilized to seek information. Teacher questioning, as a speech act, aims to achieve pragmatic purposes. Both domestic and international scholars have dedicated greatly to enormous explorations on teacher questioning. However, all the relevant researches do not go into depth merely providing some qualitative explanation; they lack systematic data and quantitative analysis on teacher questioning, along with the specific suggestions on how to make full use of questions in teaching and thus fulfill pragmatic functions and promote classroom communication.This thesis, to compensate for the inadequacy of previous researches, exerts to investigate question types employed by teachers and pragmatic purposes teachers want to accomplish when adopting questions by analyzing the questionnaires delivered to teachers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan University, Huazhong Normal University and Wuhan University of Technology and explaining results obtained from classroom observation and interview. For the development of this thesis, the theoretical basis is founded on three major theories: Communication Theory, Speech Act Theory and Politeness Theory.The results manifest that teacher questioning, as a speech act, entails various pragmatic purposes, which constraint the amount of questioning. Teacher questioning influences teacher-student classroom communication. This study classifies teacher questioning based upon pragmatic purposes and make an analysis on frequency of use; on syntactic features of teacher questioning; pragmatic inferring process; one of the pragmatic strategies-politeness and lastly presents questions that help to promote classroom communication. These results will shed light upon the exploitation of questions in teaching and provide a new perspective- pragmatic research perspective to describe and explain teacher questioning.