A Corpus-based Study Of Teacher’s Questioning In English Classrooms Of Middle Schools

In English classroom, teachers’ questioning is the main source of students’ language input. Their questions could involve students to take part in the class activities, promote them to produce effective output and let them use English as a tool to solve problems. As a result, a comparative study was conducted to find out the similarities and differences of teacher’s questionings between the demonstrational and the conventional English classrooms in order to conclude the effective questioning type and method.The data of the study were chosen from the English Classroom Discourse Corpus built by school of foreign language in Northeast Normal University(refer to Yongbing Liu, 2010). This study selected ten lessons from the corpus, among which five of them are demonstrational classes and the others are conventional classes. This study compared the similarities and differences between these two kinds of classes in terms of the teachers’ questioning behavior. Based on the discussion result of the questioning type, questioning way, teachers’ continuous questionings, this study tried to find out what kinds of teachers’ questioning would be more effective to promote the development of students’ output as well as the language acquisition.According to the results, this study finds: teachers from the demonstrational class adopted more different question types and provided more opportunities for students to produce outputs. The students from conventional classrooms were lack of initiative and their outputs were too short and simple. In conclusion, teachers who can combine different levels of questioning types and adopt the continuous questions will promote students to produce more effective output.Based upon the above findings, the following suggestions can be offered to English teachers:(1) Progressively use different types of questions, especially increasing the upper level questions during the warming-up and conclusion phase of a class.(2) Change more ways of asking questions, which would create a pleasure atmosphere, lead the class into deeper thinking and make them become more focused on the teaching content.(3) Use appropriate feedback, which could encourage students and be able to build up students’ self-confidence.(4) Use more follow-up questions to keep the students to think and improve their answers by themselves instead of the teachers’ corrections or neglects.