The Research On Effect Of Teacher Questioning On Students’ Oral English Output In Junior English Class

Questioning is one of the most widely used techniques in class teaching, and asking-and-answering behaviors among teachers and students are ubiquitous phenomena in both language classrooms and content classrooms. In a foreign language classroom, teacher questioning provides comprehensible target language input and creates communicative opportunities to initiate classroom discourse.The present research aims to investigate the influence of teacher questioning on learners’oral production in EFL classroom. Five dimensions of teacher questioning are examined in this study:question type, questioning strategy, wait time, teacher feedback and distribution of questions.Two experienced EFL teachers and two parallel classes from Zhengzhou Foreign Language High school were selected as the research subjects. Instruments used to collect the data were:classroom observations and audio-recordings. All the verbal information recorded was transcribed into words and classified accordingly for the purpose of being analyzed by SPSS.The findings of this study are summarized as follows:Firstly, through observing the two online-courses, it can be seen that in junior English classes, besides referential and display questions there are still many kinds of questioning types with certain functions.Secondly, both of the referential questions and display questions play the important role in junior English classes. And referential questions initiate students’more complex, thoughtful and longer oral English output. However, display question can initiate students’most basic cognitive activities and they can support students’linguistic training activities.Thirdly, probing, prompting and repetition are commonly used by the observed teachers. Probing is the most effective way for teachers to initiate students’oral production and enhance the depth and dimension of students’ understanding of the proposed questions.Fourthly, as for wait-time, wait-time I is significantly higher than wait-time Ⅱ. And the questions with the wait-time of more than 3 seconds can really initiate students’more complex and longer oral English output than the questions with wait-time of less than 3 seconds.Fifthly, in English class it’s necessary to use corrective feedback to enhance students’self-monitoring when they output oral English.Sixthly, in order to initiate each student’s oral English output, balancing the questioning distribution is very important.The limitation of the present study is that because of the small sample size, the results of SPSS analysis have no significant difference.