A Study On English Classroom Questioning Of Primary School

Teachers’ questioning, as an essential component of teachers’ discourse, plays a vitally important role in English class organization and learners’ language acquisition(Nunan, 1991). In current classrooms, teachers’ questioning can not only urge the students to think and study automatically, it also can show whether the students understand the subject matter. Besides, teacher questioning can also make the class more interactive, at the same time students can have chances to practice the target language. Questioning, as the most widely used techniques in English class, has been studied by many researchers. However, many researches focused on the middle school teachers’ questioning, few of them studied on the primary school teachers’ questioning especially distinguished teachers questioning. Therefore, the research takes six excellent primary English teachers as Excerpts and research in the aspect of the question type, waiting time, feedback, question distribution, etc. And the author gives some implication for more primary school English teachers according to the research. In general, the paper aims to find out the common characteristics of the six excellent primary school English teachers through the analysis and hope it could be helpful for more primary school teachers. Through directly observing teachers’ and students’ questioning behavior based on extensive research, we can better know how the teacher poses questions and students respond to them.The present study mainly aims to investigate the features of the excellent English teachers’ talk in terms of classroom questioning. It is trying to answer the following questions related to classroom questioning:What kinds of questioning types are often used by excellent English teachers in class?How do the excellent English teachers distribute their questions to students in class?How long is the waiting time of teachers after raising a question before a student begins answering it?What kinds of feedback do the excellent English teachers offer to students’ answer?What kinds of students are often asked to answer questions by the excellent teachers?What is the numbers of questions asked by the excellent teachers?The present study investigates the questioning of six excellent teachers from different area of China according to the three hypotheses theory. By the classroom observation, the author has a finding that the teachers had a good performance in some part of questioning while some problems still exist in their classroom questioning. The findings are shown below: 1) as for question type, when comparing with referential questions, display questions occupy a dominant place. The six teachers ask 379 questions in total, with 300(79.2%) display questions and 79(20.8%)referential questions. However, no referential ones have been posed by some of the teachers throughout the whole class. 2) With regard to waiting time, by classroom observation, most of the teachers tended to give 3 seconds to students after posing questions. They are good models for more teachers as many researches show that 3-5seconds are the proper length of waiting time.3) Talking about feedback, it plays an important role in classroom questioning. Teachers’ different ways of feedback make distinct influence for students’ psychology. According to the classroom observation,the author make a conclusion that the six teachers offer 186 feedback in all, among which 149 positive feedback have been posed and 31 negative feedback have been given and 6 feedback haven’t been given. 4) With regard to the coverage of the students in answering questions, we have divided the whole classroom into five parts,namely, in the front, the middle, the left, the right and the back of the classrooms. We can conclude from the data that teachers prefer to ask questions to students sitting in front of the classroom and in the middle, which has the similar result of many scholars.5) As for the quantity of questions, the author found that T1 asked the most questions who have posed 113 questions in his class, while T5 posed the least questions in her class, only 25 questions has been posed in her class. From the table, it can be found that different teacher asked different quantity of question according to different part ofthe class, among them, teacher posed most questions in the text learning part. 6)Last but not least, scholars divided the distribution of questions into the following types:teacher self-answering, nominating, volunteering and chorus answering. From the statistical results of chapter four, it can be clearly seen that the six teachers have a good balance of the four types of question distribution, especially the interaction ones which accounts for 95.6% in the data.At the end of the study, the author gives some suggestions on teacher questioning.The limitations of the study are also given at last.