Teacher questioning in EFL classrooms : a case study based on a rural junior high school in China

Abstract

This case study explores EFL teachers‘ classroom questioning in a rural junior high school in China, primarily in terms of types, functions, and strategies of teacher questioning. In addition, teachers‘ preparation and reflection on questioning, contributing factors to teachers‘ questioning, and the pattern of classroom discourse initiated by questioning are also explored. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through classroom observations, classroom audio recordings and semi-structured interviews with four teachers. The findings indicate that the four EFL teachers asked significantly more close-ended, display, and lower cognitive questions than open-ended, referential, and higher cognitive ones. Moreover, among the limited open-ended and higher cognitive questions, there was a tendency for the teachers to turn them into closed-ended and lower cognitive ones. In terms of the function of questioning, a large percentage of questions were applied for diagnostic purposes and for inviting students to repeat the answer or to practice a particular sentence structure. As for questioning strategies, the teachers distributed most of their questions to whole classes, and the difficult questions were directed to individual students with good grades. And the vast majority of questions had a wait-time of less than one second. The strategies used by the four EFL teachers while questioning also had a special feature: apart from code-switching, they used other strategies, such as rephrasing, repetition, decomposition, and nominate non-volunteers, infrequently. For the preparation of classroom questions, in general, the teachers would prepare some questions with the aid of textbooks and presented the prepared questions on the PowerPoint slides. As for the teachers‘ reflection on questioning after class, the four teachers barely reflect on their questioning, instead they would reflect on the general teaching especially when they don‘t meet teaching objectives. As for the contributing factors to teachers‘ questioning, some are at the individual level, such as teachers‘ and students‘ level of English proficiency and that the teachers took questioning for granted and did not pay enough attention to it. Some are at the school level, such as large class size, limited instructional time, and the lack of facilities and resources. And some are at the culture level: examination-oriented culture. Two patterns of classroom discourse predominated while questioning. The first one is the IRF mode and the second has some variations in the third turn of the discourse which teachers would repeat the former part of the students‘ answer with a question intonation in order to invite students to repeat the latter part of the answer with them in the fourth turn. This case study seems to suggest that English teachers in rural schools in China hold the perception of language learning as a repetition and knowledge-accumulating process in their questioning. However, more studies are needed to corroborate the findings.