An Explorative Study On Student Questioning In College English Classroom

Although considerable research has been done on teacher questioning in classroom, only a limited amount of attention has been given to student questioning. Therefore, based on some theories such as Swain's output hypothesis, metacognitive theory, constructive theory and humanistic theory, this study took student questioning as its subject of investigation and examinations were made on the effectiveness of this guidance and help in the following specific aspects, to what extent the teacher's guidance and assistance would be able to 1) increase the frequency of students' questions? 2) change the type of students' questions?3) improve the quality of students' questions? 4) change students' attitude towards English learning? 5) change students' beliefs about language learning? To serve the purpose of the study, some pedagogical actions or strategies were taken to guide and help students to ask more and better questions by changing students' beliefs about language learning, establishing a new assessment system, forming learning groups, creating a welcome classroom environment and enhancing meaning-oriented questions. Data were collected through classroom observations, questionnaire surveys and interviews.The results suggest 1) some factors affect student questioning behavior, including individual's psychological factors, learning habit, classroom structure and task type; 2) there is change in student questioning behavior in three aspects: increase of student questioning frequencies, change in student question types and improvement of student question quality; 3) there is change in student learning behavior, revealing in the change of students' attitude toward English learning and change of students' beliefs in language learning. Students' perception of questioning is a good supporting point of the effectiveness of the student questioning.This thesis also provides a detailed account of how the study was planned and implemented and concludes with some implications for college English teaching and recommendation for future research.