A Study On Foreign Teachers' Questioning In Oral English Class

Language is an important tool for social communication.Teachers' talk plays a significant role in language teaching,which is not only a tool of organizing classroom teaching,but also an important source of language input and output.And teachers' questioning is the main component of teachers' talk because most classroom interactions is prompted by teachers' questioning.On account of the importance of teachers' questioning,this thesis analyzes the characteristics of foreign teachers' questioning from the perspective of classroom interaction.The main subjects are two foreign teachers from Lanzhou University of Technology.Based on the Interaction Hypothesis,Interactive Teaching Theories and the analysis of ten lessons,students' questionnaire and teachers' interview,the author analyzes the foreign teachers' questioning from the following aspects: question types,questioning strategies,waiting time,teachers' feedback and distribution of questions.The findings are summarized as follows: 1)More display questions are asked than referential questions,and referential questions can arouse more interaction than display questions.2)When asking questions,the teachers used different questioning strategies,and “prompting” and “repeating” are the most frequently used in the classroom.“Prompting” and “probing” can arouse the most interacton.3)The two teachers often give students three to five seconds of waiting time,and the results show that giving students enough waiting time can arouse more interaction.4)The teachers give more positive feedback which can arouse more interaction than negative feedback.5)The teachers often let the volunteers answer questions,which can arouse more interaction.According to the findings,some suggestions are proposed.The teachers should balance the distribution of display questions and referential questions to involve more students in interaction.What's more,different questioning strategies especially the prompting and probing strategies should be employed.In addition,teachers should give students enough waiting time to make students think about questions more carefully and provide more output.Teachers should also have the awareness of the importance of teachers' feedback and give more positive feedback than negative feedback.And the language of feedback should be reasonable,not too simple.Besides,teachers should encourage students to be the volunteers to answer questions because answering questions voluntarily can arouse more interaction.