Studies On Classroom Questioning Strategies In Higher Technical And Vocational College English Teaching

Classroom questioning, as an important teaching strategy, gives the studentsimpetus and opportunities to produce comfortable language and has no risk initiatinglanguage themselves. Questions can be used to initiate a chain reaction ofteacher-student interaction and can let the instructor make immediate feedbacks aboutstudents’ comprehension. Classroom questioning also offers opportunities to studentsto find out what they think by what they say and involves students in learning processand stimulates students’ creative thinking in classroom interaction. Thus all EFLteachers should be required to manpu1ate the questioning behavior artfully. It isbecause of the high incidence of questioning and its consequent potential forinfluencing students’ learning that many foreign investigators devote themselves toexamine relationships between questioning methods and students’ achievements andbehaviors. But whether the conclusions drawn from the western language teachingenvironment are fully applicable to the higher technical and vocational college Englishteaching in China has to be tested. Meanwhile, very few previous domestic studies dealwith this research on higher technical and vocational colleges in recent years.With the purpose above and on the basis of relevant theories and existing findings,the thesis investigates classroom questioning mainly in the following four aspects:teachers’ questioning characteristics, teachers’ questioning strategies, teachers’feedback and students’ classroom questions. The researcher, in order to obtain thedetailed data and descriptions about classroom questioning in Higher Technical andVocational College English teaching, has already conducted the classroomobservations, questionnaires and interviews. There are4college English teachers andtheir180students from non-English major classes in Sichuan Technology and BusinessCollege as the subjects of the research. The author listened to16periods, with eachteacher4periods. And all the periods, the researcher took notes and tape-recordedwhen observing the lessons. After that all the recordings are classified and analyzedbased on the following aspects, viz. the opportune time of questioning, the ways ofquestioning, the time given to the students to prepare, the ways taken by the teachers toguide the students and how the teachers respond to the students’ answers, etc. Inaddition, all the4teacher subjects and180student subjects have been asked tocomplete a supplementary interview and questionnaire respectively to support theresults of the transcript analysis. Through the analysis of the empirical data, the researcher obtained the followingfindings:1) The proportion of display questions is greatly more than referentialquestions. However, the students prefer to answer more referential questions.2) Theways teachers raise questions have no fixed pattern. They like to ask the individualsquestions and the whole class questions.3) Of all the strategies, self-explaining andrepeating are used frequently by the teacher subjects, which have been proved lesseffective than prompting and probing. But students like prompting most.4) Studentsare not given enough time (less than3seconds) to think about the response afterraising a question. They hope teachers can wait a bit longer so that they can thinkabout answers to a full extent.5) The results of the study also show that teachers liketo offer students positive feedback, which is simple and mechanical, whileinitiation-feedback and elicitation-feedback may induce more students’ production.While the students hope their teachers give them the positive feedback withexplanation. Within negative feedback, teachers prefer implicit corrective feedback toexplicit one.6) Teachers do not pay much attention to students’ questioning in theirteaching.Based on the above findings, this study proposes some effective ways for HTVCEnglish teachers’ questioning. Firstly, teachers should balance the proportion ofvarious types of questions to arrest the attention of students at different levels.Teachers may use different types of questions according to different materials anddifferent students. Secondly, teachers are supposed to avoid their self-explaining andrepeating because it will deprive students of the opportunities to develop their targetlanguage ability. Thirdly, while modifying questions, teachers may increase a littlepercentage of prompting and probing. Fourthly, in an attempt to enable more studentsto participate in class, teachers should try to raise more questions to create moreopportunities for them. When posing questions to students, teachers need to balancethe distribution of questions and treat all the students impartially. Fifthly, whenoffering positive feedback for students’ response, teachers should reduce thepercentage of simple positive feedback and increase that of positive feedback withexplanation and comments at length. Sixthly, teachers should allow longerpost-question post-response wait-time, for students to contemplate questions, as theEnglish level of higher technical and vocational college students is commonly not sogood. Lastly, teachers need to create a favorable environment and atmosphere tomaximize students’ enthusiasm to ask questions in classes.And the researcher expects those suggestions can give some valuable references for higher technical and vocational college English teachers to apply the technique ofquestioning more scientifically and effectively.