An Investigation And Analysis Of Teacher Questions And Student Responses In Senior English Classrooms

With the rise of context approach, people began to question the practical applicability of communicative language teaching. Context is considered to be more crucial in the process of second language acquisition. Teacher questions, which make up a major part of teacher talk, provide important sources for learning context. And its prevalence over classroom discourse deserves the considerable attention that they have received. Previous studies concerning teacher questions are mainly related to question types, frequency, wait time and learners'output, etc, but few of them were conducted in senior English classrooms. This thesis, therefore, tentatively studies teacher questions and student responses in senior English classrooms from three aspects, namely they are the questions that are asked by senior English teachers, the most frequently asked questions in senior English classrooms and the length and syntactical complexity of student responses to these questions.Based on a transcript of questions and responses collected from ten senior English classes of the 6th National Senior English Teaching Observation and Seminar and other sources, the author investigates the types and frequency of questions asked by ten senior English teachers, together with an analysis of student responses in terms of length and syntactical complexity. After the investigation of question types and frequency and the analysis of the responses, the author finds that display questions still ranks first as the most frequently asked question type in senior English classrooms, but equal preference can be found on individual teachers for closed display questions and open referential question over closed referential questions and open display questions. Another finding is that open questions are superior to closed questions for its potential in stimulating students'longer responses of syntactically more complexity.The findings of the present study, achieved by authentic data collected from naturally occurring classrooms, truthfully reflect the question-and-answer phenomenon in senior English classrooms, so they will have some important implications for foreign language teaching research and practice. They offer a sensible guide for language teachers in the decision of what questions to ask in senior English classrooms, and meanwhile, enable teachers to reflect on their controlling role over classroom discourse, which makes way for further researches on raising students'awareness of autonomous learning.