An Empirical Study Of Teachers' Questioning Strategies And EFL Learners' Oral Output In VTC

Faced with economic globalization and China's entrance into WTO, much attention has been placed on training practical talents and improving students' applied English capabilities in vocational technical colleges' (VTC) English teaching. In order to achieve this goal, it is crucial to improve the quality of classroom teaching in VTC. Classroom interaction between teacher-students and among students is closely related to the quality of English teaching. However, most of the classroom interaction is carried out by 'question-and-answer' sessions. Effective English teachers' questioning strategies (ETQS) can stimulate classroom interaction. A lot of studies have been done on the effectiveness of classroom questioning, which including questioning ways, questioning time, questioning levels, questioning types, questioning wait time, questioning distribution, and questioning feedback etc (Chaudron 1988; Gaies 1987; Henzl 1979; Long 1981, 1983; etc). However, all these studies stayed at the level of rational discussion, which still need further evidences and supports, but the empirical studies were rarely seen. The author intends to do an empirical research which consists of a survey and an experiment on teachers' questioning strategies (TQS) and EFL learners' oral output in VTC.A survey study was carried out in Hunan Public Security College and Changsha Nanfang Vocational College. Altogether 10 English teachers' twenty classes were observed and tape-recorded and 494 students were investigated through questionnaires. Findings from the survey study reveal that VTC' English teaching is following a traditional way, for most of the English teachers spend a lot of time explaining language points and grammar in class, leaving little time for students' discussing and practicing oral English. What's worse, little time is spent on questioning, and Y/N questions and Or questions are favorably used question forms, and display questions are commonly and frequently used question content. The author analyzed the students' oral output from four aspects of degree of response, mean length of response, mean percentage of error-free clauses and mean ratio of syntactic complexity. The results indicate that most of EFL learners can respond Y/N questions and Or questions better than Wh- questions (X questions) and Reasoning questions (R questions); answer display questions worse than referential questions; many students can only produce simple sentences with a lot of errors in low syntactic complexity.On the basis of this survey, we can conclude that EFL learners' poor oral output is closely related to the status quo of English teachers' questioning (ETQ) in VTC. The author conducted an experimental study in Changsha Nanfang Vocational College, aiming at finding out if improved ETQS can help to strengthen classroom interaction so as to increase EFL learners' oral output and improve their applied communicative capabilities. Two second-year classes in information technology department were chosen as the research subjects, one is experimental class (EC), and the other is controlled class (CC). Some proposed ETQS (self-explaining, repetition, paraphrasing, narrowing, decomposition, prompting and probing) to raise referential questions were employed in EC to testify whether these ETQS can make referential questions more intelligible when students failed to answer, so that EFL learners' oral output can be improved. Both pre-oral and post-oral tests were carried out and their results were analyzed with SPSS 11.5, which indicate that students' oral English proficiency is greatly enhanced on the aspects of content, grammar, fluency, and complexity in the EC after the experiment, though it is almost at the same level between the two classes before the experiment. Therefore, findings of the experimental study correspond to the research hypotheses that more referential questions than display questions will result in the improvement of EFL learners' oral output and the proposed ETQS will also contribute to the improvement of EFL learners' oral English proficiency in VTC.Studies on TQS are of great significance for teachers in conducting effective classroom teaching, as well as to develop students' communicative competence and overall abilities in EFL learning. We hope that this research will give some pedagogical implications for VTC' English teaching and learning.