A Study On Teachers' Questioning In Intensive Reading Class For College English Majors

The classroom is viewed by researchers as a place where interactions of all kinds take place, affording learners opportunities to acquire second language. Teacher's question is the most commonly and frequently applied approach to initiate and sustain teacher-students interaction in class. Therefore it has been the focus of language teaching for many years. The present study attempts to investigate teachers'questioning behaviors and their effects on classroom teacher-students interaction in Chinese EFL teaching context from the following five aspects: question types, questioning strategies, distribution of questions, wait-time after teachers'questions and teacher's feedbacks to students'responses.Four teachers of English and four classes (two classes of freshmen and two classes of sophomores) of English major with a total 102 students in the English department of a key university in Chang Chun are selected as the subjects of the research. The author observes 4 classes of intensive reading with each class 1 session of 50 minutes. All the 4 sessions are audio-recorded and the recordings are made into transcription. Teachers'questioning behaviors and their effects on teacher-students interaction are analyzed based on class observation and the data obtained form recording transcripts. Additionally, the four teacher subjects are interviewed and 102 students attending the course are asked to finish a questionnaire. The results of the interviews with the teachers and questionnaire to students give support to the results of recording transcripts analysis. The findings of the study are as follow:1. On average, 49% of the questions asked by the teachers are referential questions and 51% are display questions. Referential questions and display questions take up different percentage in the four teachers'questions respectively. Compared with display questions, referential questions are more effective to promote teacher-students interaction.2. Teachers do not apply questioning strategies frequently (27%) and they apply questioning strategies differently in terms of their types and frequencies. Redirecting (64%) is the most frequently used one. Prompting (12%) and probing (24%) are less used, but they are more effective to stimulate teacher-students interaction.3. The distribution of teachers'questions is not balanced. The majority (72%) of questions are directed to students in the front and middle part of the classroom. The students at the back of the classroom get little chances (8%). The imbalanced distribution of teachers'questions has a negative effect on teacher-students interaction.4. The average wait-time after teachers'questions is 3.6 seconds and majority of students are satisfied with the length of wait-time in the research. Sufficient wait-time enables students to make full preparation and participate in teacher-students interaction.5. Teachers prefer to use more positive feedbacks (87%) than negative feedbacks (13%). Among positive feedbacks, a simple praise proves to be less effective than praise plus repetition and praise with another question to teacher-students interaction is most frequently used. Among negative feedbacks, guiding to self-correction takes up the first place, which stimulates more teacher-students interaction. The findings of the study indicate that teachers'questioning has a great effect on teacher-students interaction in the EFL classroom. The implication of the study is that more attention should be paid to students'communicative competence to evaluate students'academic performance and teachers should be given professional training to improve their questioning and promote classroom interaction. Some feasible suggestions to teacher and students are also provided with regard to effective teachers'questioning.Due to some limitations of the research, researches on larger scale subjects can be made on teachers'questioning to promote classroom interaction in EFL classroom.