A Study Of Teachers' Questioning In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Questioning is one of the main teaching activities in classroom. High efficient questioning not only can make teachers quickly know teaching and learning situation so they can adjust teaching process and strategies, but also can focus student’s attention and improve their initiative to talk in class.Selected six classrooms with different student language level of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language as the object, the article aims at discovering characteristics of teachers’questioning through tape-recording, data-processing and questionnaire. The study especially focuses on teachers’questioning numbers, questioning patterns, ways of answering, feedback to questioning. The result shows some similarities and differences of teachers’questioning in classrooms with different student language level. With the increase of student’s language level, teacher asked fewer questions while student asked more, and the ratio of questioning in teacher’s whole word decrease; teacher used more echoic questions and clarification request while epistemic questions are comparatively less used; teacher used fewer display questions; teacher less asked students to answer together; teacher used more praise and comments while student’s answer is correct, and give more tips to encourage student to correct themselves while answer is incorrect. Meanwhile, some similarities appear in classrooms with different student language level. Teacher preferred to use more display questions, ask students to answer together, repeat student’s answer and then praise when student’s answer is correct, and correct mistakes immediately when the answer is incorrect.As an assisted research method, teacher’s and student’s questionnaires aims at investing teacher’s self-awareness of questioning and student’s expectation of teacher’s questioning through comparatively analyzing the result of questionnaire and teacher’s real questioning behavior. For students with different language level, how teacher use questioning to lead to effective verbal interaction, the study also proposes some padegogical suggestions in the hope that teachers can use questions in their classroom in a more efficient way.