An Empirical Study Of The Scaffolding Function Of Referential Questions In Senior High English Classroom

In recent years, a hot topic for language researchers is either display orreferential questions should take the dominant place in language learning classroom.Many experts and scholars in modern language research field encourage languageteachers to boost the proportion of referential questions in classroom in order todevelop students’ ability of independent thinking, and to express their own views inthe target language critically. Referential questions require students to answer withknown-knowledge and unknown-knowledge. The purpose of asking referentialquestions is to exchange information. Students need in-depth thinking, plenty ofvocabulary，and a lot of sentence patterns to answer referential questions. This willincrease language learners’ target language output and be advantageous to classroominteraction and language acquisition. Therefore, it is recommended that teachersshould use referential questions as much as possible in classroom.Based on the literature review, scholars abroad have conducted in-depthresearches on display questions and referential questions. They have worked on therole of teachers questions and their types (especially display and referential questions)and the part they play in facilitating the learning, mainly from angles of interactionistsecond language acquisition theory and constructivism. Researchers in our countryhave begun to pay attention to these two kinds of questions in recent years. However,at present, empirical researches on the application of display and referential questionsare few and far between. What’s more, most studies are simple and repetitiveresearches that are limited to the number of these two types of questions and to theratio, length of wait-time in classroom. Nevertheless, from our literature review,researches concerning teacher questions mainly stopped at the conclusion thatteachers ask more display questions than referential questions. Therefore，quantitativeresearches on how to promote students’ second language by questioning is necessary.This can be the breach of the further studies of teacher question in English classroom. In view of the research status quo, based on the perspective of scaffolding theoryand using the Wood et al.’s scaffolding typology，this study aims to explore whetherscaffolding used by teachers facilitates acquisition effects of ESL (English as asecond language) learners（in this study particularly refer to lower-level languageproficiency learners in senior high school) in China by means of questionnaires,classroom observation and interview records. An experiment thereafter was carriedout. The participants being observed in the current study were all students agedbetween seventeen and nineteen from Class A and Class B from BZH Middle School,in Anqing city, Anhui province. There were eighty-three students all together,including forty-two from Class A and forty-one from Class B. Class A was a literaryclass while Class B is a science class. All these students were in senior grade two.There were also six other senior high English teachers except the researcher beinginterviewed in this study. Every two experienced teachers in three senior grades werechosen as interviewees in this study to further explore reasons. The experiment lastedfor almost four weeks. In the first week, in order to investigate the current distributionof referential questions in English as a second language classroom, the teacher-studentinteraction in English classroom of these two classes was audio-recorded for a week.Then the proportion of display and referential questions was calculated according toclassroom observation. At the same time, a questionnaire was assigned to all thestudents to explore their assessment to their teacher’s questions. Afterwards, the sixEnglish teachers were interviewed about the results and possible reasons behind thefact. In the second and third weeks, a comparative study was conducted between thetwo classes to examine the effectiveness of scaffolding referential questions. Theteacher deliberately implemented scaffolding functions in Class A by askingpre-planned referential questions while did not in Class B. During the last week, theresearcher designed a writing task requiring students to express their own opinion of areferential question. An experienced English teacher was invited to grade thosewriting papers so that the result would not be interfered by the researcher. A post-testquestionnaire was also be assigned to students to see whether their attitudes towardsreferential questions had been changed. The result of this study is affirmative: teachers’ scaffolding not only facilitatesecond language acquisition of lower-proficiency language learners, but also lessentheir fear and evasive attitude towards referential questions.