A Comparative Study On ESL And EFL Classroom Teachers’ Questioning

Teachers’ questioning plays an essential role in classroom interaction: through effectiveteachers’ questioning, English teachers can cultivate students’ learning interests, and assiststudents in learning language positively and actively, thus enhancing students’comprehensible output, promoting language acquisition, and achieving their own teachingobjectives. Plenty of researches have been discussed on teachers’ questioning from variousperspectives these years. However, investigators seldom focused on comparison of teachers’questioning between ESL and EFL classes. Thus, this thesis puts a straightforward overviewon specific features of ESL and EFL classes respectively, and aims to present a comparativestudy of those two kinds of English learning contexts. In addition, it would be helpful forChinese English teachers to draw on the experiences from TESL (Teaching English as aSecond Language) context.Instructed by Long’s Interaction Hypothesis, Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Swain’sOutput Hypothesis, the author conducts an investigation on teacher’s questioning from theaspects of question types, distribution, wait-time, feedback and strategies. The study subjectsof ESL context are two teachers and their students in ESL program of SSU (Salem StateUniversity) in the US, and the participants of EFL context are two English teachers who teachEnglish to non-English major freshmen in Yellow River Conservancy Technical Institute andtheir students. The author obtains data by class observation, interview and questionnairedistribution, and does qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The major findings arepresented as follows:1. ESL teachers provide more referential questions than display questions, while ChineseEFL teachers play the opposite. 2. Owing to specific chair organization in ESL classroom and small number of students,ESL teachers distribute questions equally. In contrast, Chinese university Englishteachers prefer to ask questions to students in the front and middle of classrooms.3. Both of ESL and EFL teachers provide more wait-time for referential questions thandisplay questions. It also reveals that the average wait-time of ESL teachers is more thanEFL teachers.4. Both ESL teachers and EFL teachers reply more positive feedback than negative feedback.The most commonly used positive feedback for ESL teachers is praise plus comments(33.6%), while that of EFL teachers is praise plus repetition (28.6%). The mostcommonly used negative feedback for ESL teachers is guide to self-repair (17.5%),while that of EFL teachers is direct correction by instructors (20%).5. American ESL teachers use more questioning strategies than Chinese EFL teachers,especially rephrasing and chaining. EFL teachers widely apply repetition strategy onaverage percentage50%.As mentioned above, there are lots of deficiencies in Chinese university English classeson the perspective of teachers’ questioning. Therefore, the author provides somerecommendations on theoretical building and practical teaching practice. Based on previousstudies, the thesis presents a relatively clear picture for current ESL and EFL situations on theaspect of teachers’ questioning. The author wishes the new view could draw more attention tothe coming scholars and researchers.