A Study On The Discourse Of Questioning In Efl Classroom

Classroom discourse analysis, a branch of discourse analysis, has drawn increasingly more attention. While teachers'questions, as an essential part in class, are raised for many purposes such as developing students'interest and motivating them to be actively involved in class activities, checking students'understanding of the text, evaluating teaching effect, and leading students the way to critical thinking and inquiring attitude. Though many studies have been conducted on questioning in English class, most of them concerned questioning behavior, including types of questions, wait time and question distribution, and seldom about question-answer discourse analysis. Therefore, the research into teacher's questions in the classroom is of great significance to the language teaching and learning.Ten college English classes by different teachers in Hunan University of Science and Technology are chosen at random in this study. The teachers'utterances are recorded and transcribed. To make the research more convincing, questionnaires are distributed to four hundred students so that their expectations and evaluation of the teachers'questioning are obtained.The results are as follows: (1) in the 45 minutes'class, more than half of the teachers spent most of their talking time questioning. Teachers attached more importance to interaction in class. However, students were not so active that teachers had to use many ways to activate class atmosphere. (2) For the features of questioning in class, reiteration was the common occurrence in college English class; while self-answering ranked the second, then was the simplification, and clustering of questions. Compared with the total amount of questions and the appearance of the four types of features of questions, we knew that most of the questions were pure simple questions, and only 26.8% on average of the questions reflected one or more types of features. Among the ten teachers, seven of them involved three or more types of features when they were questioning. This showed the tendency that teachers paid increasingly attention to questioning strategies, especially the strategies of the difficult questions. (3) For the discourse structure of questioning, several discourse patterns appeared simultaneously in one class, among which IRF pattern was the most widely used pattern by the teachers while the complex patterns such as IRFRF/I1RF, IRR1/II1R2I2RF, IRFI1 seldom appeared in class. This reflected the interaction in class and meanwhile reminded teachers of diversifying the discourse structure to better teaching effect. (4) Different types of questions convey different meaning and influence the interaction between the teachers and students. From the results, it is found that Wh-questions and the shortened forms of questions were most commonly used. Besides, the kind of yes-no questions was also usually chosen by the teachers in class. However, the teachers seldom question their students with the alternative ones. It showed the prominent position of the teachers in class and the difficulty of the questions.Based on the results of the research, four pieces of suggestions on the strategies of questioning are proposed. The researcher advises that teachers raise questions in an appropriate amount, manage difficult questions skillfully, diversify different kinds of discourse structures and choose different kinds of questions properly. It is hoped to draw college English teachers'attention to questioning and to help them present their teaching scientifically, effectively and successfully.