The Effects Of Teachers’ Question Types And Questioning Strategies On Students’ Oral Output In High School English Reading Class

Teacher questioning,the most common form of interaction between teachers and students,is vital for identifying the gaps in student’s knowledge and scaffolding student’s language development.In spite of extensive research on teacher questioning at home and abroad,few studies have investigated the relationship between teachers’ questions and students’ oral output by now.In order to address this research gap,this study intends to explore the effects of teachers’ questions on students’ oral output in high school English class.Classroom observation is selected as the research method and twenty lectures are delivered by twenty English teachers as the data of this study.Teachers’ questions and students’ responses are transcribed by the author and another researcher.Teachers’ questions are classified into eight types according to questions’ form,purpose and content based on the classifications proposed by previous researchers,and teacher questioning strategies are classified into the following three types: prompting,probing and repeating.The quantity and quality of students’ responses is measured by their length and syntactic complexity.This study tries to answer the following three questions.What are the ratios of teachers’ question types and questioning strategies in high school English reading class?What is the relationship between teachers’ question types,questioning strategies and the quantity of students’ oral output? What is the relationship between teachers’ question types,questioning strategies and the quality of students’ oral output?This study yielded the following three findings.First,of all the question types and questioning strategies,teachers prefer asking x-questions,display questions,text explicit questions,and using probing strategy.Second,x-questions,referential questions,beyond-the-text questions,and probing strategy can elicit longer responses.Third,students usually prefer using words or phrases,and simple sentences to answer questions.And x-questions,referential questions,beyond-the-text questions,and repeating strategy can elicit more complex sentences.The findings of this study indicate that different question types and questioning strategies have different effects on students’ oral output.Therefore,in order to achieveeffective teaching,English teachers should ask more questions and use more questioning strategies that are conducive to students’ oral output.