Research On Student Reticence And Teacher Questioning Strategies In Vocational College English Classes

In EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom, teachers’questions, an important part of teacher talk, play a dominant role in leading and organizing students into various communicative activities, through which students can exchange information and express themselves in the target language. Since the learning process of Chinese EFL students is mostly confined to classroom context, student participation in classroom communication is of great importance to improve their language proficiency. However, Chinese students tend to be reticent in EFL class.Drawing upon the theories of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Long’s negotiated Interaction Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis, taking127students and4teachers from first-year non-English majors in Wuhan Vocational College of Software and Engineering as subjects, and adopting classroom observation and interviews as the study method, this study explores the current situation of student reticence in vocational colleges and its causes from the perspective of teachers’ questioning strategies.The result of the study shows that student reticence is a common phenomenon in vocational colleges. And the author discovers that there are many problems in terms of teachers’questioning in this vocational college leading to student reticence:the proportion of display questions teachers raise is far outweigh referential one; the lack of diversity in the ways of raising questions, featuring frequent adoption of nomination; partiality in question distribution; wait-time is not enough; rare adoption of probing strategies to slow students; feedback is too simple and automatic to encourage students. From the result, it can be found that teacher questioning strategies do contribute to student reticence in EFL classes of vocational colleges. Teachers should strengthen their academic studies and endeavor to activate students’ participation in classroom activities, thus improving language teaching quality.This thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the thesis, in which the research background, significance and objectives of the study are presented. Chapter two is literature review, which covers the basic knowledge about student reticence and teachers’questioning strategies, as well as the researches done before on these two topics. Chapter three is theoretical consideration, which is about the information of the three theories concerned. Chapter four is about research design which includes the purpose, research questions, subjects, instruments and data collection in this research. Chapter five is the core of the thesis, which includes the data presentation and data analysis. Firstly, a survey about the current student reticence in the investigated vocational college is presented. And then teachers’actual adoption of questioning strategies in contributing to student reticence, types of questions, ways of answering questions, distribution of questions, wait-time, probing as well as feedback, are discussed. Finally, the factor of educational system in limiting teacher questioning strategies is briefly mentioned. Chapter six is the conclusion of the thesis, in which the results of the study are summarized, the limitation pointed out, and suggestions for further researches presented.