A Study Of The Effect Of Teachers’ Questioning On Interaction In Language Teaching Class

A famous Brazilian scholar Freire (1978) said,"There is no dialogue, there is no communication; no communication, there will be no true education." Teachers’talk is very significant in foreign language teaching. It is not only regarded as a method of language teaching, but also as an important source of students’language input. Meanwhile, teachers’questioning is viewed as a crucial part of teachers’talk. As one of the teachers’initiating activities, teachers’questioning is the most frequently used teaching methods as well as the form of interactions between teachers and students. Recently numerous studies on SLA (Second Language Acquisition) have revealed the importance of teacher-student interaction in the language learning as it engages students in learning process and inspires students to utter thoughtful responses. It also creates opportunities to exchange information and express thoughts. In view of the important role of teachers’questioning in the classroom teaching, the present study investigates the effect of teachers’questioning on the classroom interaction to promote English teaching.In order to figure out the effect of teachers’ questioning on interaction, with the method of naturalistic inquiry, the thesis is based on the theories of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Long’s Interaction Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis. The classroom discourses are audio-recorded and all the audio-recordings are transcribed which can be used for analysis as well as interviews and questionnaires. The obtained data are classified into five aspects:questions’ types, questions’ distributions, questioning strategies, waiting time and teachers’ feedback. The main findings of this study are summarized as follows:(1) Display questions are more employed than referential questions in class. The advantages of referential questions outweigh display questions in promoting students’ output.(2) Teachers use questioning strategies flexibly, whereas they use repeating strategies more than prompting and probing strategies.(3) After questioning, the teachers nominate students or the whole class to answer the questions together.(4) The waiting time after teachers’ questioning is too short, usually less than three seconds.(5) Teachers’ feedback is too simple, such as "good","good job" or "yes".Based upon the findings, this study comes to the following conclusion:(1) English teachers make a balanced choice between display questions and referential questions to promote students’ language output because referential questions are helpful to the classroom interaction.(2) The teachers often diversify questioning strategies. And among all the questioning strategies, prompting and probing strategies are beneficial to the classroom interaction. And the students hope their teachers to use prompting strategy.(3) The teachers encourage students to take the initiative to answer the questions. The students being volunteers are the most beneficial way to promote the classroom interaction.(4) The teachers should offer students enough time to think the answer of a question. But the waiting time should not be too long.(5) It’s necessary for the teachers to be fully aware of the importance of feedback and use different feedback to avoid too simple feedback. The positive feedback with comments plus praise is helpful to students’ language output.Due to the limitations of the survey, the subject of the teachers’questioning is to be further studied.