Effects Of Teachers’Question Types On Students’English Written Production

Teacher questioning has been playing a significant role in classroom teaching in improving learners’ language output and enhancing their communication ability. Hence, numerous research, such as the types, methods, distributions and functions of teachers’ questioning and so on, have been conducted in multi-angle horizons in western world, from which we have concluded a lot of good teaching methods in questioning. Comparatively, research at home is far from satisfactory, and relatively few empirical studies have been conducted on questioning types’effect on learners’ output, and most are being confined to the theoretical or macroscopic perspective. Owing to the critical importance of the teachers’ questioning and the intention of improving teaching methods, this study attempts to find out the effect of teachers’ question types on students’ written production by Krashen’ input hypothesis, especially display questions and referential questions.After a pre-test and a questionnaire on English learners’ writing interests and attitudes, this study selected46intermediate learners in English writing (according to CET-4criteria) as the final experimental subjects from non-English majors defined as A-level during the Placement Reform of the Hunan Agricultural University. The researcher compared both groups’ results of two time-limited as well as topic-assigned tests by independent samples t-test and paired samples t-test, aimed to find out which type of questions (display questions or referential questions) imposes better influence on students’ written production in terms of contents, accuracy and complexity:(1) The statistics obtained from SPSS indicated that referential questions have better effect on learners’ written production in terms of accuracy and complexity than those of display questions.(2) Neither referential questions nor display questions have statistical significant difference on student’s written contents. Data collected from the categories of topic relevancy, coherence, structure organization on both groups are very close.(3) The researcher investigated participants’ opinions on these two types of questions through the questionnaire. The results indicated that compared to display questions, intermediate level learners in English writing would be much more preferable to be guided by referential questions while writing in EFL classroom. They believe this kind of questions boosts their written output in terms of fluency,accuracy and complexity.Based on the above conclusions, some pedagogical implications have been made. More referential questions should be raised in English writing classroom, from which learners will benefit a lot in terms of textual output. Also, the purpose of the writing task is the key to which question type to be raised. Display questions shouldn’t be overseen by teachers. Furthermore, both teachers and students should be well aware of the functions of each question type since it does really affect their output.However, due to the limitations of the research itself, there is still much room for further research in regard to the issue.