Examining Teacher Questioning From A Sociocultural Perspective:A Case Study Of Two Experienced High School EFL Teachers

Questioning has been used by teachers as a powerful and indispensable tool,functioning in a variety of ways in class.An abundance of studies has attempted to reveal its complexity in different aspects,but there has long been a discrepancy between questions that were considered valuable and effective by the theorists and those that teachers asked in class.To eliminate the gap by presenting a more holistic and detailed picture of teacher questioning(TQ),the current research adopted the perspective of the sociocultural theory of mind(SCT)and provided a qualitative case study of two experienced high school EFL teachers’ TQ from both etic and emic perspectives.The current study adopted a qualitative case study design.Multivariate data were collected,including classroom observations(both exemplary and regular lessons),semi-structured interviews,stimulus recall,reflective journals,and other physical materials.Concerning data analysis,this research provided a detailed analysis of classroom episodes using concepts in sociocultural theory and affordance to demonstrate how questioning was used as a mediating tool by experienced teachers in class.Meanwhile,factors that influenced this behaviour were explored with bottom-up thematic analysis.Based on the above analysis,this study sought to answer the following two questions:(1)How did experienced high school EFL teachers utilize questioning as a mediating tool during instruction?(2)What in fluenced their way of using questioning as a mediating tool?Several findings emerged from the analysis:First,experienced teachers’ TQ involved a variety of mediated-learning behaviours,such as challenging and probing;and TQ mediation was characterized by three features--multiform,multistage and multilayer.Second,experienced teachers’ TQ was influenced at three levels:sociocultural context,teacher cognition and classroom setting.Under each level,there were a variety of mediating factors.The three dimensions interacted constantly with each other and the various factors were closely linked as well.Third,the contributing factors of experienced teachers’ employment of TQ mediation were:(1)access to affordances in the environment of various kinds.(2)the decisive role of teacher agency.(3)the co-regulation between teachers and students.(4)the mutual support between theory and practice.The study contributed to revealing the mediating function of TQ and enriching the current understanding of this complex behaviour of teachers.Also,this study provided practical implications for EFL education and teacher development by giving suggestions on how to employ and develop TQ.This study concretized the key terms in SCT and affordance theory and fostered the development of EFL research from an SCT perspective in the Chinese context.