A Study Of EFL Teacher Questioning Behavior In Secondary School And Its Implications For EFL Teacher Education

The present study focuses on what is going on in the language classroom, especially on teachers' questioning behavior. Through observation, the interactive features of teacher questions in middle school is revealed by examining the production initiated by teacher questions and specific empirical evidence is provided for necessity of developing teachers' command of classroom language and some implications for foreign language teacher education are elicited from this study.Classroom-centered research has focused on "such things as the linguistic features of classroom language, teacher talk, patterns of teacher-student interaction, teacher treatment of errors, communication strategies, turn-taking patterns in the language classroom, code switching, and other factors that are believed to influence second language acquisition" (Richards and Plats 2004: 64). During the 1980s and 1990s, research into teacher behaviors in the classroom showed that teacher talk dominated in the classroom discourse and its effect on language acquisition was under observation. That teachers tend to ask many questions in conversation is a frequent observation of investigations (Cormack, Wignell and Nichols, 1998). Research on teacher talk in China is not too much and theory-oriented. Although some research on teacher talk touches upon teacher questions, teacher questions get superficial treatment. Four secondary school EFL teachers are selected as observed teacher subjects in this study. The study adopts the IRF discourse analysis model together with Long's (1985) interaction hypothesis and Swain's (1985) output hypothesis to analyze the teacher questions in classroom discourse and the interactive functions of questions are illustrated in this study by description. Four research questions are under discussion here: (a) how do observed teachers utilize questions to create opportunities for students' output? (b) how do observed teachers questions as interactional modifications to get negotiation of meaning? (c) how do observed teachers elicit questions from students' response to check linguistic problems in interaction? (d) how do observed teachers make use of the direction of questions to motivate student to take part in the interaction?The present study has two contributions. On one hand, this study reveals the observed teachers's use of questions and examines the the interactive functions of teacher questions through genuine data. Four findings are drawn out. Firstly, observed teachers utilize both display questions and referential questions to create opportunities for students to output language and observed teachers resort to more display questions than referential questions, while the examination of excerpts from classroom discourse suggests that referential questions are flexible and provide opportunities for students to formulate more genuine language output. Secondly, questions as interactional modifications are used by observed teachers to get negotiation of meaning; and among the use of the three interactional modifications, the frequency of using comprehension checks is highest while the frequency of using clarification requests is lowest among the three interactional modifications; generally speaking, observed teachers' use of questions as interactional modifications diversifies individually and some observed teacher (e.g. T₂) uses fewer questions as interactional modifications. Thirdly, observed teachers tend to elicit questions from students' response to check linguistic problems, in which way teachers can enhance students' learned language knowledge and impart new language grammars in the interaction. Fourthly, some of the observed teachers make use direction of questions to motivate students to get involved in interaction, while some observed teacher (e.g. T₄) still needs to improve questioning techniques to facilitate teaching by stimulating students' motivation. On the other hand, specific empirical evidence is provided for teacher education on developing teachers' command of classroom language so that teacher can control the classroom discourse to facilitate the second language teaching. Three implications are elicited from the present stduy for foreign language teacher education. Briefly, firstly, teacher education should attach great importance to teacher professional language as a unified language and teachers should get involved in different teaching contexts to enhance their professional language; secondly, in the purpose to uncover the current situation, a teacher talk corpus should be created for teacher education so that the experts can pose effective approaches to improve teacher quality; thirdly, teachers should be trained to use questioning strategies in order to have good command on questions in language classroom.