Pragmatic Study On Teacher Questioning In EFL Classes Of Elementary School In China

Classroom teacher questioning has always been the hot issue in the research of teaching methodology. Questioning, as an effective form of teaching, bears the key functions of organizing classroom activities, it also has great impacts on the classroom communication. The researches on the discourse of classroom teacher questioning are fruitful at home and abroad, but they are mostly studied from the pedagogical aspect and based on the theories of second language acquisition. In China, the researches on classroom teacher questioning only target on the EFL classrooms of university and vocational college. No one has made a study about teacher questioning in EFL classrooms of elementary schools from the pragmatic perspectives. Therefore, this paper aims to make a descriptive analysis of teacher questioning in EFL classrooms of elementary school from the pragmatic perspectives for the purpose of revealing the current pragmatic situation of teacher questioning at primary schools and finding out the strategies that can improve teaching questioning and promote classroom interaction in elementary schools .The present study is based on a large amount of data which can represent teacher questioning of the present condition of English teaching in the elementary schools in Hubei Province. It studies the types of teacher's questions and the features of teacher's questions, and it also makes a descriptive analysis of the teacher questioning in EFL classrooms of primary schools based on the communication and context theory, speech act theory and politeness theory, aiming to approve that teachers use the speech act of questioning to achieve different pragmatic purposes. Then it classifies teacher questioning based on the pragmatic purposes and further analyzes the politeness strategies of pragmatic inferring process and strategies. Then it finds out question types that hinder and promote the classroom communication respectively. Finally it presents, when questioning, the following strategies are advisable for English teachers in EFL classroom of primary school to stimulate students interest in learning and to promote the classroom interaction: i) repeating questions; ii) simplifying questions; iii) translating the questions into students'mother tongue; iv)changing addressees; v) eliciting collective answers; vi) answering by the teacher self.This study provides a new perspective-pragmatic perspective to study primary school English teacher questioning which enriches the research on teacher talk of primary school. It is hopeful that primary school English teachers can realize that their questioning is a speech act which can not only perform a certain pragmatic purposes, but also produce a certain perlocutionary act which will directly affect the classroom interaction as well as the enthusiasm of students'English learning. Therefore, when questioning, English teachers at primary schools should adopt strategies to improve the quality of teacher questioning and stimulate students'learning interest and facilitate classroom communication.