A Study On The Interactive Mechanism And Strategies Of Classroom Questioning In College English From The Perspective Of Autonomous Learning Theory

Learner autonomy is one of the dominant international topics in language learning nowadays. Teachers' classroom questioning has been traditionally viewed as focus of foreign language classroom teaching. How to strengthen the form and content of classroom interaction has been a popular issue and hot spot in the field of education. A lot of scholars at home and abroad have done lots of researches on teacher questioning and learner autonomy, respectively. However, in China, research in these areas starts late, and little has been done in classroom interaction and teachers' classroom questioning from the perspective of learner autonomy. Over the recent decades, as the focus of foreign language teaching is shifted from "the teacher-centerd" to "the student-centerd", the rationality and necessity of coupling research on learner autonomy and English classroom questioning are continuously emerging, taking the classroom interaction as the starting point. How to combine questioning strategies and classroom interaction is the motivation of this paper.Relying on the background of College-English-teaching reform, based on the view of learner autonomy, referring to previous studies, following the principle of promoting classroom interaction, being supported theoretically by such theories as constructive theory, humanistic theory, metacognitive theory, cognitivism theory, interactionist theory and education idea of "the student-oriented", this study samples 8 teachers and 345 students from the first-year non-English majors in Lanzhou City University as the investigation subjects, and probes into the logic relationship of EFL classroom questioning strategies and classroom interaction. Taking classroom observations, classroom recordings, interview and questionnaires as the studying methodology and interaction mean as the main criterion for classroom interaction, the researcher's empirical analysis and discussion focus on the teachers'questioning strategies in the following six aspects: questioning types, wait-time, questioning strategies, discourse patterns, teachers' feedback patterns and students'questioning.The research suggests that: teachers are using more display questions (76.6%) than referential ones (23.4%) that can better promote students to think and participate in classroom interaction. Teachers usually provide students with 0-3 seconds (64.3%) of wait-time, however, longer wait-time (5-8 seconds or more) yields not only promotes students' language output, but also encourages more interaction in classrooms. Among four kinds of strategies, self-explaining (43.8 %) and repeating (36.9 %) are the more frequently used way of questioning, while prompting and probing which are effective ones, with a success rate of 69.2% and 61.5%. Among four different discourse patterns of EFL teacher questioning:IRF, IRFR, I1R1(InRn)F, and IR1F1(RnEn), the IRF pattern (62.7%) is the dominant one in classroom discourse. Among three different patterns of Teachers' Feedback, the positive feedback (76.1%) is the dominant one in classroom discourse. With the guide of the researcher, student questioning behavior has been enhanced in the college English classroom, especially in question frequency, question types and question quality, this is beneficial to classroom interaction.So, it is pedagogically essential and important for the auther to quest the reasonable paths on how to form and optimize interactive mechanism and strategies of classroom questioning on promoting learner autonomy in college English class. Hence, in China, the following points should be focused on by educational administrations, school, researchers, linguists and English teachers: (1) To reasonably create a harmonious atmosphere for question asking and answering; (2) Innovating teaching and learning pattern in English class; (3) To Scientifically deal with the relationship between teachers'and students' questioning; (4) To try developing positive, feasible, and developing dynamic teacher-student interaction pattern; (5) Improving the efficiency of using questioning skills properly in class; (6)Optimize procedures for implementing learner autonomy; (7) Locating new roles for teachers and sdudents; (8) Efforts to promote the development of classroom interaction by thinking interaction, affection interaction and behavioral interaction.However, research on College English classroom questioning is an open system engineering. It's not enough to study it only from the perspective of teachers'questioning, and it deserves more thorough and comprehensive research.