A Study On Teacher Questioning In College English Intensive Reading Classrooms

In the area of second language acquisition, teacher questioning has attracted much attention of researchers. Classroom interaction is conducted in the process of teacher questioning and student responses, Effective interaction produces more student responses and increase student output. Based on input, output, interaction hypotheses in second language acquisition, this study centers around three research questions.(1) What is the major type of teacher questioning in the classes observed?(2) In what ways is teacher questioning related to students'responses?(3) How does wait-time after teacher's question influence the way students respond to teachers'questions?The data of the study were derived from observation (altogether 12 intensive reading lessons of the 4 teachers with each teacher 4 lessons, which amount to 360 minutes of recording), a student questionnaire and a teacher interview. On the basis of data analysis, findings to the research questions are drawn.Most of the teachers'questions were display questions, while only a small number of referential ones were asked. From the perspective of types of questions, student responses to display questions were usually shorter and syntactically less complex, while their responses to referential questions were often longer and more complex. From the perspective of the way questions are answered, students tend to respond to display questions in chorus; while, posing referential questions, teachers tended to nominate student to answer. As for the discourse patterns of teacher questioning, it is very clear that IRF/E pattern was dominating in class and most of IRF/E patterns were mainly initiated by display questions, while referential questions relatively initiated more complex interaction structure such as IR [I,R,(…)]F, IR(InRn)F that can better enhance the classroom negotiation of meaning and authentic information exchange. As for questioning strategies, the four teachers observed did not make full use of them. Prompting was frequently used among the four teachers. While, prompting and probing were more expected by students for their effect in stimulating students and cultivating their thinking. The average wait-time of display question was 2 seconds; while the average wait-time of referential was 7 seconds. Result shows that the third group (more than 5s) success rate of student responses to questions is higher than the other 2 groups, which indicate that proper extended wait-time will lead students to get more opportunities to prepare their response and organize their utterances. While results shows that the success rates of students' responses to questions between group 1(less than3s) and group 2 (3s-5s) are similar, which indicate that the quality of response was not only affected by ratio with the length of the wait-time given by the teachers.In the light of these results, the author puts forward some pedagogical implications of the study. Although the number of the classes for observation in this study is limited and the findings may not represent all the situations in English classes, this tentative study reveals that more attention from teachers and researchers and more efforts on improving the quality of teacher questioning is needed.