Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1Background of the Study
For years, the classroom discourse have been attracted more attention among thelinguistic theorist, educators and teaching practitioner. The Chinese learners spendmost of their time learning English in the classroom. The learners in the setting of thetarget language interact with teacher or other students. Hu (2000:2) commented thatinteraction was an unavoidable part in the second language acquisition. The secondlanguage learners don’t have much opportunity to confront the target language tocommunicate with others. The interaction between the students and teacher thatoccurred in the process of language acquisition could be the one to provide themaximum of comprehensible input and improve the output of the students. Teacherquestioning is significant part both in the management of classroom and the secondlanguage acquisition (Nunan, 1991:189). Teachers make use of questioning to checkthe students whether they remember the language points and grammatical patens,which is considered to be a significant element during the activities of classroomteaching and learning. The teachers identify whether the students use the language ina proper way or just intimate the pattern. As the significance of questioning, it isnecessary for teachers to find effective ways to ask questions in class and promote theinteraction of classroom teaching. That’s the reason why the author chooses this fieldto research.There are a variety of theories and hypotheses which have been contributed toexpound the process of classroom interaction affected the second language acquisition,among which interactionist of psycholinguistic theories and the social theories wouldbe the famous to us.
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1.2Significance of the Study
“All of knowledge results from questions.” contented by Postman(1979:140).The teachers’ questioning is a significant component in the teaching process. It is apedagogic method of how to make use of questioning to dig beneath the surface of ourideas in cultivating deep learning.For many years, the communicative approach has been widely accepted by mosteducators and teaching practitioner. Teacher-student interaction was thought to be amajor element of students’ language input and output. In Hong Kong, a research ofEnglish lessons has showed that nearly 70% of classroom talk has been acted duringthe process of the teacher questioning and then students’ response to what the teacherasked (Tsui, 1985). For this reason, the teacher questioning makes a great contributionin teaching process which will not be neglected by most researchers.After the systematic observation of teaching behaviors, a large amount ofelements of effective teaching behavior have been put forward. Teachers’ question isimportant to promote the teaching process effectively. Recent years the research ofclassroom questioning appeared rapidly, more and more researchers make greatcontribute on research of questions between the teacher and students. Long and Sato(1983) studied L2 teachers’ questioning with an emphasis on the category of questionsand the distribution of questions. Rowe (1986) extended the study of classroomquestioning to wait-time, the frequency of the different types of questions used inclassroom. Nunan (1991) believed that it is more effective by implanting the positivefeedback than negative feedback in students’ behavior and motivation of languagelearning. Studies on classroom questioning didn’t appear very early in China, butrecently more and more researchers make their efforts in this field.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Research on Questioning
In this chapter, the author first reviews the definition and classification of teacherquestioning as well as other basic concepts of questioning. A review of previousstudies on teacher questioning is provided.Questioning is one equipment to facilitate education in classroom circumstances.Freiberg and Driscoll (1996) stated that it is more dominant instructional strategy thanthat of lecturing, and the questioning is one of crucial techniques applied by teachersin classroom teaching. According to some research in the classroom, almost half ofclass time is covered with interaction by question and answer. (Richards & Lockhart,1994). Furthermore, in the interactive classroom, questions attract more attention fromresearchers. Not only are they one source of input students take, but also they couldsupply some opportunities to get students involved in the language learning, each ofwhich is key point in the process of second language acquisition.
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2.2 An Overview of Relevant Theories
Language acquisition is a process that the learner masters the competence of bothlinguistic and communication. What’s more, exposure of target language to learners,which was consider to be the most useful part toward the success of second languageacquisition.Krashen(1982) confirmed that once the learners’ input has been possessedenough, the language acquisition may take effect. Furthermore, the input of languageshould be a little higher over the level of learners present. The concept of ‘i+1”principle was put forward by Krashen (1982), in which ‘i’ stands for the situation oflearners’ current language competence that need to make progress, ‘1’ here representnew knowledge that learners are going to acquire. Learners’ acquisition is a processby transforming the model of ‘i’ into the model of ‘i+1’ in the nature order.Krashen(1982) further suggested that in order to make the ‘i+1’ principle becomeeffective automatically, comprehensible input and successful communication shouldbe indispensable.Teaching questioning is a relevant issue that belongs to Krashen’s InputHypothesis. Teaching question consumed to be a kind of natural target language as acomprehensible input which expose to the students in the language class. What’s more,the complexity of question should accord with the current level of students, in otherwords, the teacher should not use too professional words or complex sentence toexplain the new item for the sake of students’ better understanding.
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Chapter 3 Methodology .....18
3.1 Research Questions.....18
3.2 Participants and Setting.......18
3.3 Data Collection .......20
3.4 Data Analysis ......20
Chapter 4 Analysis and Discussions .....22
4.1 The Results of Forms of Questions.....23
4.1.1 Distribution of Different Forms of Questions.......23
4.1.2 Effect of Different Forms of Questions ....25
4.2 The Results of Types of Question .......27
4.3 The Results of Content of Question....31
4.4 The Results of Way of Asking Question .....34
4.5 The Results of Wait-Time .......35
4.6 The Results of Feedback .....36
Chapter 5 Conclusions.......44
5.1 Findings of the Study ......44
5.2 Implications.....45
5.3 Limitations ......46
Chapter 4 Analysis and Discussions
This chapter deals with answering the research questions. It intends to focus onthe comparison on teachers form of question, the types of question, content ofquestion, way of question asked, wait-time, and feedback between the two types ofclassroom, and then to find out how this difference effects the oral production ofstudents. The quantitative results will be presented first and then conversationalanalysis is also done for further explanation.According to the research questions and literature review, it is attempted toanalyze the teacher question into categories listed in the following table. As we can see, there are four forms of questions arranged in the table. In thetable of class A, the most questions asked are the form of ‘Wh- questions’, whichusually connect the words like ‘who’ ‘what’ ‘which’ ‘when’ ‘where’ ‘why’ ‘how’. Thestudents’ answer of this kind question can been found out in the textbook or base onthe personal knowledge or common sense derived before. Because of various contentsrelated to this question, the answers of that always require one more sentence torespond completely. As a matter of fact, the amounts of utterance to reply thisquestion are the most. It followed that the mean length of this utterance are the longest.It is figured out that the students’ reply is supposed to be the activity of expressioncertain topic rather than the process of leaking several words. That is to say, this kindof question could promote the amount of students’ oral production. Another questionoften raised in the class is yes/no question, which is a necessary component in theinteraction of classroom teaching. Replied with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the teacher could easilyget the students attitude about some facts. But the mean length of utterance is only 1.8,which obviously showed that students only judge the fact by yes or no. Hence the oralproduction here is restricted. In class A, both gap-filling question and translatequestion is less used.
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Conclusion
With both the quantitative and qualitative analyses, it is found that there are somedifferences in the way of questioning two types of classes. In the normal classtraditional teaching form obviously occupied the most time where teacher providedquestion for the sake of attracting students’ attention other than raise some desiredquestions which require the students to have a deep thinking. In the normal classquestions of the words and grammar structure are mostly focused on. As a resulttranslation question have been transformed into an effective tool to testify whetherstudents master the knowledge of language which occupied a significant proportion.Hence, more display questions are applied than referential questions in the normalclass. There are fewer students’ utterances compared with the model class, because itwas restricted by the questions about the meaning of words and how to translate thekey sentences of text. The students have little opportunity to express their own ideaswith previous knowledge of language and their critical thinking was less developed byresponding to the question provided in the class.
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Reference (omitted)