An Investigation And Analysis Of Teacher's Questioning In EFL Classrooms Of A High Vocational College

Teacher's questioning is an ancient and efficient pedagogical approach, which can greatly facilitate the acquisition of second language. Effective questions can not only promote students to participate in the classroom activities, but also increase the communications in target language between teachers and students and students and students, thus pushing students to add rich content to their language output, which will in turn improve students'language communicative competence. Owing to these reasons, teacher's questioning attracts a large number of researchers to make extensive and deep researches. Unfortunately, most of the current studies on teacher's questioning are concentrated on high schools or undergraduate universities. Apparently, adequate emphasis has not been attached to high vocational and technical colleges yet. Considering that high vocational and technical colleges are an important part of higher education, whose English teaching are also undergoing great reform recently, it is positive and significant to conduct researches and analysis on teacher's questioning in EFL classroom of high vocational colleges.Under the guidance of the theory of comprehensible input and output, interaction hypothesis and constructivist and based on the analysis of the previous findings on teacher's questioning in EFL classrooms at home and abroad, the author adopts questionnaire, observation and interview approaches, and select four teachers and over 200 students from different majors in Hubei Finance and Taxation College as subjects to be involved in this investigation and analysis.With the data from questionnaire survey and the results of classroom observation and audio-recording, the author discovers that there are many problems in terms of teacher's questioning in this high vocational college:display questions greatly outweigh referential questions and the form of questions is rather simple; wait-time is relatively short; questions are distributed among students unevenly, and teachers show partiality in questioning; teachers' questions lack diversity in questioning strategies; teachers' feedbacks are monotonous; students are passive in responding to what teachers have asked, and tend to be negative in English learning. On such basis, four main factors affecting teacher's questioning are exposed as following:teacher's personal professional proficiency, language teaching environment and facilities, and the teaching materials for vocational students, while the most crucial factors which determines the efficiency of teacher's questioning is student's English ability and psychological development. According to these problems, some recommendations and implications are put forward for English teachers to better master the principles and techniques in questioning; moreover, English teachers should endeavor to create a psychologically relaxed and agreeable classroom atmosphere, activate students to participate in the classroom activities, which will bring the functions of questioning into full play arid substantially promote the language teaching efficiency.