A Study On Teacher Questioning In English Classes Of The Junior High School

The final goal of learning a language is to communicate with target language.The communicative competence of students,English teachers should focus on promoting interactions between students and teachers in English teaching.As Nunan(1991)claims,teacher talk is vital both on the aspect for classroom organization and on the aspect for L2 language acquisition.And teacher questioning,as the essential part of teacher talk,is the main source of learners' input.Teacher questioning can be used by teachers to evoke the interactions between students and teachers.In many classes,“teacher asks—students answer” activities take up most of the class time.From classroom observation,teacher questioning is regarded as the most widely used strategy in teaching.It is very vital for effective teaching that teachers can put forward good questions.Krashen(1981)'s comprehensible input hypothesis mode,Long(1983)'s negotiated interaction hypothesis and the comprehensible output hypothesis theory of Swain(1985)are the three theories of second language acquisition.Based on the three theories,an analysis and study are conducted on teacher questioning in junior high school English classes in this thesis.And then some suggestions are put forward.In this study,the author selected three teachers' talk as corpus to study the teacher questioning in junior high school EFL classroom.The data of this study were chosen from the eleventh National Junior High School English Teaching Seminar which held in Qingdao University from 14 th to 16 th of November,2015.It was held by Foreign Language Teaching Professional Committee of National Association of Foreign Language Education.Observation and transcription were adopted by the author to analyze the data in this research.Based on analysis,the findings and conclusion are as follows:(1)The three teachers employed more display questions than referential questions.(2)Diverse questioning strategies were employed by the three teachers.The most frequently adopted strategy is the questioning strategy of repetition,and the strategy of probing ranks the second while the strategy of rephrasing ranks the third.The proportion of chaining is at the bottom.(3)The models of students' response can be divided into chorus-answering,volunteering,nomination and no answer.The most of the models of students' response are volunteering and nomination.And then the answer model of chorus-answering ranks the third.(4)In the three English teachers' classes,the teachers give far more positive feedbacks than negative feed backs.When they give positive feed backs to the students,the teachers prefer to using simple praise which taking up to 51%.Praise plus repetition which accounting to 35%,is listed the second while praise plus comment which taking up to 15% is listed the third.When students make mistakes,the three teachers tend to choose the error treatment type of offering a clue and leading self-repair to deal with the students' errors.Based on the study,the author proposes four suggestions to teacher of English to take into account for their teaching practice:(1)Increase using more referential questions in English classes to promote the English learners' thinking and encourage them to produce more target language output.(2)The diverse questioning strategies should be properly employed to promote the learners' target language learning.Among these strategies,teachers can pay more attention to adopting the strategy of probing.(3)Pay more attention to giving equal answering opportunities for students when teachers lead to nomination.In order to promote the thinking of students,teachers should design more different levels' questions according to students' different levels.(4)Teachers can offer more efficient feedbacks.Avoiding always employ simple praise when teachers offer positive feedback,praise plus comment and praise with repetition can be adopted properly.When teachers give negative feedbacks to students,pay more attention to the language of teachers,offering a clue and leading self-repair are better error treatments for students than explicit correction.