A Study Of Vocational College English Teachers’ Classroom Questioning

As an indispensable part of the teaching process as well as an important means of stimulating students’ verbal responses, classroom questioning plays an important role in the classroom teaching and students’ language acquisition. Therefore, researchers have been focusing on classroom questioning for a long time. Many foreign researchers have studied this issue from different angles and different aspects, but whether the conclusions drawn from the western language teaching environment are fully applicable to the vocational college English teaching in China has yet to be tested. Meanwhile, very few previous domestic studies deal with the research on vocational colleges developed in recent years.Accordingly, based on the constructivism and the output hypothesis, this thesis explores the following three questions, namely, the characteristics of vocational college English teachers’ questioning, vocational college students’ expectation of teachers’ questioning as well as teachers’ and students’ attitudes to teachers’ questioning by classroom observations, questionnaires and interviews. The subjects of the study are twenty-eight college English teachers and362students from Hunan Vocational College of Science and Technology. This study intends to find out the characteristics and major existing problems of vocational college English teachers’ questioning, with a view to figuring out the effective ways which meet vocational college students’ needs as well as providing valuable information and references for vocational college English teachers to reflect on their questioning behaviors and improve their questioning skills.The findings of this study show that vocational college English teachers’ questioning has the following features:1) The proportion of display questions greatly exceeds that of referential questions; meanwhile, the text questions predominate over the questions on students’ experience;2) Teachers’ self-answering is the most common, which, however, is not desired by most students. And students’ voluntary answering is also more frequent, which is the most preferred by students;3) The questioning strategies most commonly used by teachers are repeating and prompting, while students prefer teachers to use the technique of decomposition;4) Generally speaking, teachers tend to ask the students in the front or middle to answer questions, while the students hope that teachers pay more attention to the students at the back or in the corner;5) After students answer questions, teachers generally provide them with positive feedback, which is more general, simple and mechanical. However, students expect teachers to give more positive feedback with detailed explanations and comments;6) Teachers’ post-question wait-time is usually less than3seconds, and students want teachers to extend their wait-time to3-5seconds;7) Although many aspects of teachers’ questioning fail to meet the students’ expectation, yet, they hold a positive attitude to the role of questioning. Teachers and students are generally aware of the importance of questioning. Based on the results of the survey, the present study investigates the effective questioning strategies of vocational college English teachers:1) Designing appropriate questions and insuring reasonable proportion of different types of questions;2)Trying to avoid teachers’ self-answering and letting students answer voluntarily as well as taking other students’ needs of answering into consideration;3) Selecting appropriate and effective questioning strategies;4) Showing more concern for the students at the back or in the corner;5) Providing appropriate feedback and evaluation;6) Giving students sufficient time to think over the questions.The results of this study show that there are many inadequacies in the vocational college English teachers’ questioning. Therefore, the author makes a number of concrete suggestions such as developing teachers’ professional expertise, improving their questioning strategies, analyzing students’ needs and consulting some criteria for effective questioning. Based on the previous studies, adopting qualitative and quantitative analyses, this study makes a preliminary research on the current status in vocational college English teachers’questioning, which intends to provide some valuable references for vocational college English teachers to apply the technique of questioning more scientifically and effectively.