| As a prominent feature of classroom talk, teacher questioning in the second language teaching environment is the most basic tool that teachers use to organize the class, stimulate interaction, arouse students’ interest, and examine students’ understanding. Therefore, teacher questioning has attracted the attention of many researchers for decades.However, the existing research on classroom teacher questioning is mainly focused on the type of questions, distribution of questions, and questioning wait-time,little research explores the scaffolding assistance of teacher questioning from the perspective of Sociocultural theory and compared the scaffolding assistance between novice teacher and expert teacher. Aiming to examine how questions are used to guide students’ language development and better off the classroom interaction, and to know how differently novice and more experienced teachers ask effective questions, the present thesis makes an empirical investigation of teacher questioning in the EFL classroom in a senior school of Jiangxi Province by using the methods of observation and interview based on previous research findings of teacher questioning and scaffolding theory at home and abroad.In this study, four English teachers and their students were selected as the subjects. The author observed and recorded a total of 8 English classes(2 classes of each teacher) with each class session of 45 minutes. The recordings were transcribed and the scaffolding features of teacher questioning were coded based on the typical categorization proposed by Wood et al.(1976).Three aspects of teachers’ questioning behavior will be investigated and compared between novice teachers and expert teachers: questioning types, modification strategies and teachers’ scaffolding assistance impact. Through comparison we try to find the differences and similarities between these teachers and provide further implication for teacher professional development.The following are specific research questions:1) What are the frequency and distribution of the questioning types and modification strategies used by novice teacher and expert teacher in EFL classroom?2) How do teachers use questions to scaffold language learning in EFL classroom?3) What are the similarities and differences of the novice teacher and expert teacher in the scaffolding assistance of their classroom questioning?The findings of the present study are as follows.First, the statistics in the present study show that the majority of the questions provided by the teacher are still the display questions. However the share of referential questions has more compared with the former research results. And expert teachers intentionally asked more referential questions than novice teachers.Second, four kinds of questioning modification strategies in the four teachers’ classes are identified: repetition, simplifying, probing and self-explaining. Among them the teachers adopt the most is probing, which is more effective to stimulate teacher-students interaction. Next to the probing is the simplifying, which can lead the students to complete the problem by simplifying the questions, so as to elicit more responses from the students. Next is repetition, which is used when teachers find their students feel difficult to respond or their attention is not concentrated.Third, during the teacher-students interaction, teachers do provide students with scaffolding questions to help negotiate and construct their language knowledge, which make learners’ participation in the classroom activities more dynamic. The scaffolding assistance that teacher questioning mostly serves as is DM(Direction Maintenance).Teachers often repeat her questions, or ask more related questions to keep the direction of discussions. Next to DM is RDF(Reduce the Degree of Freedom). When students do not understand questions or produce incorrect answers, teachers often simplify their questions to make it easier. And then is R(Recruitment), MCF(Marking Critical Features). D(Demonstration) and FC(Frustration Control) are used least.Fourth, the scaffolding assistance of novice teacher and expert teacher had similarities and differences. Both novice teachers and expert teachers used scaffolding as a viable structure, and obeyed the DM-RDF pattern. And not all scaffolding assistance had a positive effect on students. However, compared with expert teachers,novice teachers’ mastering of scaffolding means wasn’t that proficient. Novice teachers intended to use Chinese question to simplify questions and played a dominant role in the scaffolding process.According to the findings, a number of implications can be drawn for EFL teaching: 1) teachers should make better use of questioning modification strategies to elicit response from students; 2) teachers’ awareness of their critical role in scaffolded learning interactions should be trained during the teacher education; 3) noviceteachers should learn from expert teachers and use teachers’ questioning scaffolding effectively and avoid their dominant role in classroom. |
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