An Analysis Of Teacher Questioning In Junior EFL Classes

In the foreign language teaching classroom, teacher talk is not only an effectivemedium of teaching, but also an important example of classroom language application.Teacher questioning is an indispensable part in teacher talk. As the mostfrequently-used and effective interaction between teachers and students in classroomteaching, teacher questioning plays an important role in increasing students’ interest,encouraging students to participate in the teaching activities, improving students’deepthinking and cultivating students’ communication and so on. Questioning could alsoplay an important role in students’ input and providing more opportunities forstudents’ output in target language. There are so many relevant researches on teacherquestioning; but until now, there are no detailed researches of teachers’ questioning inJunior EFL Classroom. Therefore, this thesis makes the study of teacher questioningin Junior English Classroom, combined with the sixteen teachers’ teaching videos in2010so that the study is of great significance to improve the quality of the JuniorEnglish teaching.In order to find out the basic characteristics of teacher questioning of Englishteachers in junior English classes, this thesis bases on the Input Hypothesis, OutputHypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis, and the research subjects are16outstandingjunior teachers who participated in National High-Quality Junior English ClassroomTeaching in2010, and the thesis takes the sixteen English teachers’ lessons as thesamples, and this thesis makes the study by using the methods of video analysis,classroom observation, quantitative research and quantitative research.This thesis mainly makes the research from the three different aspects: types ofteacher questioning, strategies of teacher questioning and ways of teacher questioning.And then some problems that exist in the classroom teaching are put forward. Finally,some effective advice and implications are put forward so that the quality of teachingin Junior EFL classes can be improved. According to data analysis and classroomobservation, the results of the research are as the following: (1) There are more display questions posed by teachers than referential questionsin teacher questioning. Because of the different teaching purposes, teachers wouldpose different types of questions during different stages.(2) Among all the sixteen teachers in the teaching competition, repeating strategy(44.8%) is the most frequent-used strategy, and the other four questioning strategiesalso apply a large amount. Nearly all the questioning strategies are used effectively inclassroom teaching.(3) Different ways of questioning are used flexibly by teachers to encouragestudents to participate in the teaching activities on class, and volunteering (46.6%)and chorus-answering (35.1%) are the popular ways of questioning used by studentsduring answering the questions.According to the results of this research, this thesis puts forward someimplications to improve teacher questioning in Junior EFL Classes from two aspects:(1) the implication for the teaching and learning in Junior EFL Classes;(2) theimplication for improving English teaching in Junior EFL Classes.However, due to some objective factors and subjective factors, such as the numberof subjects and the capacity of author, there are some inevitable limitations in thisresearch. In the end, the thesis points out the limitations of the research and providesdirections for further researches.