A Study On Junior English Classroom Teacher Questioning: Perspective Of Interaction

Interaction is the driver for the language development in the language teaching ((Mackey, 2006). It is very important to employ some strategies to promote classroom interaction in Junior English teaching. Some teachers often lack effective strategies and are puzzled by the cause of interaction failure. We may find the teachers play a very important role in English classes, Ellis (1990) even thinks that teachers have the ultimate responsibility for managing classroom interaction. So it is very significant for the teachers to make use of effective method to improve interaction. One of the best ways to develop teachers'roles as an initiator and sustainer of interaction is to develop some questioning strategies which would influence student participation and learning outcomes. During the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of researchers have concluded that teacher questions which are the composites of teacher talk play an important part in the language teaching. Because teacher questioning is not only a source of students'language input but also provide chance for the students'language output and feedback. Recently, many researchers put forward many suggestions to improve classroom teacher questioning from many different perspectives. This research attempts to study teacher questioning on the basis of classroom interaction and further answer the questions by studying the relationship among teacher questioning, the interactive classroom and Second Language Acquisition. It is about what role teacher questioning plays and how it works in classroom interaction and would be of great importance in finding clues to explain the acquisition process. The present study may provide a perspective difference from the previous studies and may be useful for researchers who are interested in investigating how English teachers utilize teacher questioning.This research makes a study of teachers'questioning by classroom observation and participation in daily teaching activities for two months in a middle school in Ningbo. And the writer investigates the students of the teachers'class by questionnaires as well. The purpose of the research is to know about the teachers'questioning in Junior English class, including question type, wait time, the ways questions are answered and teachers'feedback. And find out the problems in teachers'questioning from the perspective of interaction, and then puts forward some suggestions to improve teachers'questioning in order to enhance classroom interaction ultimately.The findings indicate, current junior English classroom teacher questioning exists the following problems: firstly, the quantity of display question in the English classroom overwhelms the quantity of the referential questions, display questions still play a major role in the current junior English teaching; secondly. there isn't adequate wait-time after question-asking, the students rarely have enough time to formulate appropriate answers; thirdly, teachers'questions always answered by whole-class or appointing to a special student, volunteers are rare; fourthly, teachers provide feedback for most of students answers, but still provide no feedback or negative feedback to some answers, furthermore, most of the active feedbacks are simple active feedbacks; finally, interactions between teacher and students are mainly teacher-initiated. Students-initiated interactions are greatly insufficient. So, the writer put forwards four suggestions from the perspective of improving classroom interaction.