The Influence Of Teacher Questioning On Students' Oral Output In English Classroom Of Senior High School

In English classroom,teacher questioning,as an important part of teacher talk and one of the teaching methods widely used in classroom teaching activities,is the main source of students' language input.What's more,teacher questioning can effectively create communicative situations for students and provide opportunities for oral output.It is also a bridge between teaching and learning.Thus,the research on teacher questioning in English classroom and its effects has always attracted extensive attention from researchers of Second Language Acquisition(SLA)and foreign language teaching experts.However,most of the studies are still at the level of theoretical analysis and focus on the University stage,while less attention is paid to the high school stage.Therefore,from the aspects of question types,question modifications and waiting time,this study mainly studies the influence of teacher questioning on students' oral output in senior high school English classes.Based on Krashen's Input Hypothesis,Long's Interaction Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis,the study invited four English teachers and 166 students in Grade One and Grade Two of Xi'an Foreign Language School as participants.Through classroom observation,student questionnaire and teacher interview,this study investigated the present situation of teacher questioning and its influence on students' oral output.This study not only measured the average length of students' oral output in terms of quantity,but also measured the complexity of sentence patterns,the number and ratio of successful oral output in terms of quality.The main findings can be summarized as follows:(1)Teachers use more display questions than referential questions in English class.However,students' oral output ofreferential questions is longer and the sentence structure is more complex than that of display questions.(2)The question modifications of repetition,prompting,probing and redirecting are used by the teachers of the observation class for many times.Among them,repetition is the most frequently used,followed by prompting,redirecting and probing.While prompting and probing can elicit students' longer and more complex oral productions than other question modifications.(3)In terms of the waiting time after questioning,the students' oral output within more than 3 seconds is more complex and the mean sentence length is longer than that within less than 3seconds.According to the research results,some practical suggestions were put forward to improve the level of teacher questioning,and the limitations of this research are clarified,in order to help the future research on teacher questioning in foreign languages and the actual teaching of teachers.