A Study On Chinese College English Teachers' Classroom Questioning

Classroom questioning has a long history with its great importance in teaching and learning. Teachers can enlighten and organize students to participate in communicative activities in classroom by questioning. At the same time students can derive opportunities to improve their language learning from answering questions.At present, the researches on teachers classroom questioning are mainly focued on the description of teachers questioning characteristics. However, there are relatively few studies on college English teachers questioning and students expectations towards it. Therefore, this thesis explores the features of college English teachers classroom questioning and students expectations towards it by classroom observation, interviews and questionnaires and comes up with suggestions that indicate how teachers improve questioning behaviors.The subjects of the study are five college English teachers and their 292 students from five non-English major classes from China University of Petroleum. Through observation, recording and taking notes the author analyzes the teachers questioning in their in-class text explanations from the aspects of classifications of questions, the ways questions are answered, questioning strategies, wait-time and feedback. In order to see into students expectations and needs for teachers questioning, after the author listened to the five teachers classes students from two classes filled in the questionnaires and eight of them were interviewed to make up for the questionnaire.Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, the results show that in the majority of the teachers classes there are more display questions than referential questions. But most students show clear preference for referential questions. When it comes to the ways that questions are answered both teachers and students showed a negative attitude towards teachers answering. The questioning strategy that teachers use most is the prompting, which is also preferred by most students. In order to consider questions to full extent, students expect teachers to prolong wait-time. In terms of feedback students expect teachers detailed explanation and comments. What s more, most students show a positive attitude towards teachers explicit correction for mistakes.The results obtained from the experiment are expected to help teachers raise questions in more effective ways, contribute to the teacher-student interaction in college English classroom and improve the college English teaching effects.