The Influence Of Teacher Questioning On Learners' Oral Production In EFL Classroom

The questioning is one of the most widely used techniques in the teachers'repertoire, and asking-and-answering behaviors among teachers and students are ubiquitous phenomena in both language classrooms and content classrooms. In a foreign language classroom, the teacher questioning provides comprehensible target language input and creates communicative opportunities to initiate classroom discourse. The present research aims to investigate the influence of teacher questioning on learners'oral production in EFL classroom. Three dimensions of teacher questioning are examined in this study: question type, questioning strategy and wait time.An experienced EFL teacher and two parallel classes from the School of Foreign Studies, Jiangnan University were selected as the research subjects. Instruments used to collect the data were: language proficiency tests, classroom observations and audio-recordings. Before the observations, the tests were taken by all the student subjects to determine their English language proficiency which was used in group dividing. Then, the classroom observations and audio-recordings were conducted continuously for a month to collect all the first-hand data for the use of analysis. All the verbal information recorded was transcribed into words and classified accordingly for the purpose of being analyzed by SPSS.The findings of this study may be summarized as follows. (1) The learners'oral responses to referential questions are usually longer and more complex than those to display questions. The data show that there is no significant difference between the two groups'oral production to the display questions. But, there occurs significant difference between the two groups'oral production while responding to the referential questions. (2) The questioning strategies employed by the EFL teacher are effective in eliciting learners'oral production. There is no significant difference between the two groups'oral production when the strategies of self-explaining, prompting and redirecting are used by the teacher. (3) Increasing the wait time appropriately (wait time of more than 3 seconds) has positive influence on learners'oral production, but decreasing wait time will apparently hinder the lower-level learners'oral responses. Based on this study, we have found that the three dimensions of teacher questioning simultaneously exert influences on learners'oral production but maybe at different levels. The question type is at linguistic level, which has more influence on learners'cognitive comprehension and linguistic expression. The questioning strategy functions at psychological level, which has more influence on learners'motivation, attitude, etc. And the wait time exerts influence on learners'oral production at operational level, which can provide learners with time for preparation.The method of naturalistic observation is used in this study to ensure the observing subjects in their natural environment. The advantage of this type of research is that it allows the researcher to directly observe the subjects in a natural setting. But, the disadvantages of naturalistic observation in this study include the fact that it can be difficult to determine the exact cause of a behavior and the observer cannot control for outside variables. So, the limitation of the present study is that it has only investigated the influence of teacher questioning on oral production of the class as a whole, lacking the evidence to explain how teacher questioning exerts influence on individual students. It is suggested that follow-up researches are necessary to investigate interactive effects caused both by outside and inside variables in classroom discourses, such as learning objectives, learners'characters, topic familiarity, learners'interest and attitude, etc.