A Study On The Inlfuence Of Teacher Questioning On English Classroom Interaction

As a Chinese saying goes, what matters most is teaching someone the way to getsomething rather than the things the person want. However, China’s traditional highschool English teaching is to "take the teacher as the center, emphasizing “how toteach”. This teaching mode emphasizes teachers’ leading role in teaching, but ignoresthe initiative of students learning. During the learning process, the independence andinitiative of the students is limited. In this kind of teaching environment, teachers andstudents are lack of emotional communication and information exchange. In thisreception learning mode, students will lose their chances of exploring knowledge ontheir own, develop the habit of lazy learning, and believe firmly the teacher to givethe answer, therefore gradually losing the competence in imagination and creativity.With the reform of classroom teaching, students’ subjective role in classroom teachingis increasingly apparent in the classroom, the education ideas encouraging students asthe learning center are drawing more and more researchers’ attention. To improve thelevel of interaction between teachers and students in the teaching process, lets thestudent feel the satisfaction of analyzing, exploring knowledge, doing research in theclassroom teaching, help them develop the competence of solving problems bythemselves and construct the interactive relationship between teachers and students,teachers are encouraged to make their teaching interactive. This kind of teaching canfully embody the people-centered education innovation. In recent years, more andmore researchers are focusing their attention on improving the classroom interaction.But almost all of these researches did no systematic research combining classroominteraction with teacher questioning. They devoted their researches to the importanceof interaction teaching in senior English classrooms but did little in improvinginteraction from the aspect of teacher questioning. Therefore, the present studyattempts to study interactive teaching on the teacher questioning perspective to probewhether and how it influences classroom interaction.This thesis is presented with four parts. In the introduction part, the background and significance of the study are concerned. To ensure the scientificity of the research,definitions and concepts of interactive teaching and teacher questioning are studied. Ibase my study on Krashen’s input hypothesis, Swain’s output hypothesis, and Long’sinteraction hypothesis. Besides, studies on former researches on teacher questioningmake the strategies in questioning clear and based on their classifications the presentstudy conduct the research from five aspects, that is the question distribution, questionmodification, teachers’ wait-time, teachers’ feedback and question distribution amongstudents. In part3, the methodology of the study is presented.3classes with3Englishteachers are involved in the research. The3teachers, with teaching experience of30,10, and2years are comparatively representative. The data needed for the research arecollected with3instruments: questionnaires, classroom observation and interviews tothe teachers. Students’ interactions related to different questioning skills are calculatedwith interaction minute and interaction length in words. By comparing the length ofinteraction time and the number of words in responding to a question, the authorprobed the relationship between questioning techniques and interaction. Theobservation and questionnaires are employed to find out how different classificationsof questions, questioning approaches, time for students to response to a question,teachers’ accession, and question distribution influence interaction in classroomteaching. The findings make it clear that teachers’ questioning strategies really playimportant roles in improving the effectiveness of classroom interaction. Effectivequestioning helps to inspire the students’ learning interest, promote the students’participation in the classroom activities, making them more willing to interact andcommunicate with their teachers. In addition, it can not only promote both thestudents’ learning and teachers’ teaching, increase the emotional communicationbetween students and teachers, but also make the students study in a comparativelymore practical way, and finally have students’ English level improved. When raisingquestions, it is suggested that teachers should pay attention to the following factors:what to ask, when to ask, how to ask, wait-time, feedback, question distribution andquestion modification. However, because of the limited time and personal researchability, there is still some room for improvement and further research. Therefore, in the end of the study some limitations are listed.