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1. Introduction 介绍
对于教学，提问是一个重要的工具。它是由大量的相关研究表明，教师花了50%的课堂时间提问（格雷泽和人，1994）。在有限的课堂教学时间内，充分利用问题是达到教学目标的重要意义。在课堂上，老师要求各种各样的目的，以达到最终的教学目标。在实践中，教师可以选择不同类型的问题，以实现相同的目的，由于几个有影响的因素。在这一研究领域，专家和作者已经发现了许多方法来分类的类型的问题，其中，开花的（认知过程）和汤普森（显示和沟通）是最广泛接受和应用。一般而言，对于教师问题的早期研究，以认知过程为基础的开放分类法是非常普遍的。但对于英语课堂教学，汤普森的观点更为实用，因为具体的教学目标是语言习得与促进学生的认知发展相结合。此外，本文提出了一种新的显示和交际问题之间的关系的看法。
与以往的研究结果相反，数据显示，更多的交际问题被问到比显示问题。这一显着的发现表明，它是不明智的断言沟通的问题总是比在任何质疑条件下的显示问题。英语教师应迅速自如地在两者之间自由地进行教学，使之成为一个成功的课程。For teaching, questioning is a crucial tool. As it is suggested by a number of related researches, teachers spend up to 50% of class time on raising questions (Graesser & Person, 1994). Within limited teaching time in classroom, making good use of question is very significant in reaching the teaching objective. In a class, teacher asks questions for a variety of purposes to reach the final teaching objective. And in practice, teacher may choose different type of question to realize the same purpose due to several influential factors. In this research area, experts and authors have found many approaches to categorize the type of question, and among them, Bloom’s (cognitive process) and Thompson’s (display and communicative) are most widely accepted and applied. Generally speaking, for early researches on teacher questions, Bloom’s taxonomy which is based on cognitive process is very prevalent. But for EFL classes, Thompson’s perspective is more practical-based since the specific teaching objective is language acquisition in combination with promoting students’ cognition progress. This article is aimed at making a data-based discussion on the display and communicative questions used by 4 EFL teachers teaching in the University of Liverpool and giving some interpretation of rationale and effectiveness of their choices. Besides, this article suggests a new view of the relationship between display and communicative questions.
Opposite to previous researches under the similar topic, data shows that more communicative questions are asked than display questions. This remarkable finding suggests that it is not wise to assert communicative question is always better than display question under any questioning condition. EFL teachers should swift freely between two types of questions to make a lesson successful.
2. Background 背景
Just as what has been found by Almeida (2012), teachers always ask a high frequency of questions: ‘a teacher asks, in average, 69 questions per hour, what corresponds to 30000 questions per year.’ That is the reason why teachers have been called ‘professional question makers’ since an early age (Aschner, 1961). Admittedly, questioning is very critical for teacher since it is not only a manifestation of teacher talk (Majid & Mehrdad, 2012), but also a major form of classroom interaction between teacher and student. Speaking from the perspective of teacher talk, Cullen (1998) pointed out that teacher talk of EFL teachers is pivotal since teachers have a superior status in the classroom and so students would take in what is said by the teacher as the only live target input. In terms of classroom interaction, Thompson (1997) emphasized that ‘One of the main forms of interaction between the language teacher and the learner is through questions’. That is to say, time is worthy spending on questions if teacher could involve all students in leaning and form vivid interaction in the classroom. In this background section, review of related literature is made
from two aspects: question functions, and classification of questions.
2.1 Functions of questions
For teachers, teaching time is so valuable that no one would waste time asking meaningless questions. As suggested by Christopher H. Tienken, Stephanie Goldberg and Dominic DiRocco (2009), a good teacher should prepare questions before giving the lesson just as what a lawyer would do before coming into the courtroom: ‘Lawyers enter the courtroom with a questioning strategy, aimed at achieving a goal.’(Christopher H. Tienken, Stephanie Goldberg and Dominic DiRocco, 2009) Just as the lawyer, It is of significance that teacher consider his or her teaching objective carefully before preparing any questions. Having a clear teaching objective, the teacher could then choose questions to form a path and then guide students to that goal. When making choices between questions, teacher should be very aware of questions’ functions and make good use of them to reach the teaching objective successfully. First of all, to ensure high quality leaning, students need to be focused, well organized, involved, facilitated and prepared to learn. In a classroom, a teacher can never order students to be what he or she wants them to be. Instead, the teacher has a tool called questioning. Questioning is an effective tool for teachers since questions have various functions such as “focusing attention, exerting disciplinary control, getting feedback and most important of all, encouraging students to participate” (Majid & Mehrdad, 2012, p. 162). Besides, teachers can also use questions “to elicit information, to check understanding, and also to control behavior” (Nunan and Lamb, 1996, p. 80). Moreover, questions are also asked to “arouse curiosity, focus attention, develop an active approach, stimulate pupils, structure the task, diagnose difficulties, communicate expectation, help children reflect, develop thinking skills, help group reflection, provoke discussion and show interest in pupils’ ideas”. (Wilayat Bibi Khan and Hafiz Muhammad Inamullah, 2011) Likewise, newly conducted research added that “Questioning strategy is a fine effective strategy in teacher-student interaction, and it benefits the construction of new teacher-student relationship” (Sun, 2012). That is to say, questioning has another potentially important function which is affecting students’ emotional changes and developing teacher-student relationship. Assumingly, a teacher seldom uses questions and keeps giving lecture of language knowledge; student could feel alienated and less responsible for their learning. It is of high importance that EFL teacher uses questions to make students emotionally motivated and genuinely interested in the language. Thirdly, question’s function can be reflected from a different perspective which is scaffolding. In Kim’s research done in 2010, she found out that questions have three functions in terms of scaffolding. The first function of question is “to share teacher’s expectations for building a supportive classroom community and learning goals with students” (Kim, 2010). The second function that question can have is “to deepen student understanding about English language, text comprehension, and communicating while maintaining a supportive classroom learning environment” (Kim, 2010). The last function is “engaging students in sharing” (Kim, 2010). In one sentence, teacher can use questions to “gradually released responsibility to promote the development of student ownership in language learning” (Kim, 2010). It can be concluded that questions can have a variety of functions. Different questions should be raised according to different purposes of EFL teachers. Only when the function of question and the purpose of teacher are matched to each other could the questioning to be said effective. The interesting thing is that teacher may choose different types of question to realize the same purpose. That is way scholars, in this area, have done a lot of efforts to categorize questions.
2.2 Classification of questions
The last section has discussed several widely agreed functions of question and mentioned the importance of establishing classification of it; this section introduces two main ways of classifying questions. There are actually many possible perspectives to do that, but only effective categorization of question can lead to useful research findings. As it is said by Gall (1970), “Most of the question-Classification systems are composed almost entirely of categories based on the type of cognitive process required to answer the question.” In other words, the early stage of question classification is focused on cognitive process. Among all 11 classification systems listed out by Gall, the most widely applied one is Bloom’s taxonomy. Bloom (1956) divided questions into 6 stages arranging from the lowest to the highest cognitive
order: knowledge, comprehension, analysis, synthesis, evaluation and application. Although the system was establish in the year 1956, it is has been so popular and representative that even researches based on Bloom’s taxonomy still can be easily found in recent years. For example, Wilayat Bibi Khan and Hafiz Muhammad Inamullah’s research (2011) found out that: “Majority of the questions were lower order i.e. they were knowledge, comprehension, and application based as these levels are considered as lower order under bloom’s hierarchy of cognitive domain.” They continued to find out the patterns of question choice related to EFL teachers. In conclusion, they gave two important points. The first point is related to gender: female teachers use more questions in the low level due to their limited linguistic capabilities. The second point is about experience: fresh teachers ask both more low and high order questions. However, scholars established another style of question classification since language learning is not simply individual cognitive process. Instead, August & Hakuta(1997) proved that “ELLs are more likely to succeed in learning English as a second language (ESL) when they have teachers, peers, and community members who affirm their cognitive and linguistic capacities and provide support (August & Hakuta, 1997). It means that for EFL teachers, their first priority is not to promote students’ ability to recall or analysis or apply but to use these cognitive activities as media of language teaching and learning. The point is not how far students can think but how much they can express using English. Under this consideration, cognitive process-based classification of questions may be not comprehensive enough to get an over view of #p#分页标题#e#
C:\Users\徐佳茜\AppData\Roaming\Tencent\Users\769745131\QQ\WinTemp\RichOle\_NZ7JD@N}0)5WGWQL{)T_D3.jpgquestions used by EFL teachers. As a result, a new idea of categorizing questions is really needed to cover important aspects of questioning happening in EFL classroom (Thompson, 1997). In Geoff Thompson’s famous paper named Training teachers to ask questions published in the year 1997, he divided questions into 12 types by combining three dimensions: the form, the content and the purpose. The criteria of the first two dimensions are quite clear but the meaning of display and communicative questions needs clarification. According to Thompson (1997), display questions refer to those ones whose purpose is not to gain information. In other words, when the teacher raised this specific question, he or she has already known the answer. Thompson (1997) added that the key to tell display questions is teacher’s response. If the teacher is responding to the student’s grammatical points in answer, then the question is display question. In fact, this kind of question is very common in EFL classroom and many researchers have found out that questions asked by EFL teachers are mostly display questions. By contrast, communicative questions are
those questions whose answers are unknown by the teacher. Clearly, display questions will be only asked in the classroom while communicative questions are much more authentic and have a very high possibility of being asked in real life. As a result, scholars have a marked preference of communicative questions while data found in real life has been quite disappointing: it seems that EFL teachers are not using communicative questions frequently enough. The pity is that no significant researches have been found which can give an analysis of influencing factors of the EFL teachers’ choice between display and communicative questions.
3. Data 数据
Four EFL classes taught by four EFL teachers from the University of Liverpool were observed and the observe focus was on teachers’ questions. Both formal interrogative sentences and sentences ended with rising intonation by the teacher were regarded as questions. Making a little adjustment to Thompson’s idea, questions are recorded into 8 types. In total, 111 questions were raised. Every question used by the teacher was recorded with the approximate length of student’s answer to them respectively. Data are shown in the table below. (The boldfaced questions are those ones with high frequency of use)jpg Besides, some other background information related to the class was paid attention to as well. See the table. Class size is measured by student number. Students’ English level is represented by their approximate range of IELTS marks. Class atmosphere is assessed from the lowest 1 to the highest 5. The table shows specific information of each lesson. It should be pointed out that the first three classes were aimed at undergraduate students of the University, while the last class was given to Chinese visiting students aging around 30s.
4. Findings and Discussion 发现与讨论
In this study, more communicative questions are used than display ones. Functions of communicative and display questions are explained by giving examples. After that, a new view of status of display and communicative questions and the relationship between those two types of questions is suggested according to discussion findings.
4.1 Question functions
Communicative questions In tall, there are 75 communicative questions used by 4 EFL teachers, which stand for approximately 66.4% of all questions raised by them. After going through every communicative question appeared in 4 EFL classes, it is concluded that they have 3 significant functions: to encourage student participation, to control student behavior (e.g. giving instruction and maintain discipline) and to get feedback. 1. Yes/no communicative questions on personal fact It is the question type with the top appearance and also the most functional one among all question types. 39 questions of this type cover all 3 main functions of communicative questions found in this study. As shown in the table below, 17 of them are used to encourage student participation; 14 of them are aimed at getting feedback; and 8 of them have the function of behavior control. In terms of encouraging participation, the length of students’ response shows that this type of question functions quite well: 7 out of 17 get students’ responses with more than 13 words. Especially in Class 4, 5 questions received responses for more than 13 words. The teacher of class 4 tends to use this type of question to encourage students’ participation in this way: “Jenifer, could you tell us something about your chart?” or “Victor, can you report what your group said?” From the examples given above, it can be noticed that although the questions are in the form of yes/no, the answer that these questions are seeking for is not simply yes or no. The teacher adds the phrase “could you” and “can you” to make his question sounds more like a polite invitation instead of a request. Seemingly, the question is questioning on the student’s personal ability (or fact). In fact, students can naturally interpret it as a signal of taking the floor.
In terms of getting feedback, this type of question is also very popular among teachers. Especially in Class 3, 4 out of 5 questions of this type were used to get feedback from the student. However, in this class, effectiveness of questioning is quite disappointing. In Class 3, the teacher has a preference of asking questions like this: “Does anybody have problem about the above situations?” “Any other questions about that?” “Any people have questions about this?” Clearly, she is trying to get some feedback from her students. Getting feedback from the class is obviously important for teacher to confirm students understanding and to carry on teaching. But her students kept silence for twice. The intension of using these questions is good and quite clear. Also, students should have no difficulty in understanding the purpose of these questions. However, few students took the turn to give some feedback. There could be two factors causing this result. For one thing, the questions are too broad to be answered. Besides, the wait time allocated to this kind of question is too short. However, in fact, teachers do seek feedback from the class in this way and student always keep silent. By the term behavior control in the classroom, it represents two aspects: giving instruction and maintain discipline. Both of these two aspects are very significant during the teaching. By giving instruction, teacher can set up activities. In order to ensure that teaching goes on smoothly, teacher should also have good skills in maintaining discipline. These two manifestations of students’ behavior control can be
realized by this type of question as well. For example, in Class 1, teacher asked “Could you do in three?” This one sounds like a question but actually it is an instruction for grouping. Similarly, in Class 4, the teacher almost gave all instructions in this way. He raised all 6 questions of this type to give instructions. When giving instructions, questions have an obvious advantage over imperative sentence since questions make the teacher sound polite and kind. Again, it is of significance to keep the teacher and student in an equal status. In conclusion, for this type of question, there are several interesting features. The first point is that this type of question can make the teacher sounds very polite and friendly to students, no matter when the teacher is encouraging students to participate or giving instruction. The second point is that students are very familiar with this type of question and can interpret the inherent purpose of teacher’s question very well. 2. Wh- communicative questions on personal opinion This type of questions takes the third place of overall frequency. The function of this type of question is encouraging students’ participation. Take questions found from Class 4 as examples: “What do you think happened, Cathy?” “Where do you think this picture was taken, Wendy?” “What kind of city?” “When do you think it was taken?” When asking these questions, the teacher raised a picture of bombarded city and in fact he did not know the answer to these questions as well. The aim of asking these question are getting student to do some brainstorm activity and make some foreshadowing for the listening activity that the student were going to do. It can be
noticed that these questions are related to each other to some extent. In fact, the effect of asking a set of questions like this is very good: on average, responses from students were 12 words. To summarize, Wh-communicative questions on opinion are very valuable in the early stage of setting up an activity. Moreover, teacher could ask a list of related questions to activate student’s thinking which can warm them up for the next stage. 3. Yes/no Communicative questions on personal opinion Still taken questions from Class 4 as the analysis target since 9 out of 11 questions of this type were used by this class. Common examples are like this: “Do we all agree?” “Cathy, do you agree?” “Everybody agree?” “Do you agree?” It is found out that the teacher was combining two functions together within one question: asking those questions, the teacher was seeking feedback from the student but at the same time, encouraging students to participate. Particularly, the teacher of Class 4 used many questions of this type when asking students whether they agree or not. In teaching, agreement check is a very typical form of getting feedback. At the same time, by asking students whether they agree with the idea or not can also encourage them to participate in discussion. However, data of Class 4 manifests that this strategy did not receive much effect. For the most of time, students just say “yes” and no more utterance. Being agree to others is the quickest way to tackle that kind of question and even the student did not hear other’s opinion, he or she would probably show agreement as well. To draw a conclusion on this question type, although much more directly seeking for #p#分页标题#e#
student’s opinion, the effectiveness is not as high as teacher expected. Even if it is a good idea to combine getting feedback and encouraging participation in one question, students tend to preserve their words and get that question over as soon as possible. . Display questions Generally speaking, display questions were less popular among 4 EFL teachers but functioned quite well. In this category, Wh- leading ones were much more prevalent so analysis is made on this specific type. Obviously, questions of this type are mainly functional at encouraging students’ participation. However, data reveals that, under some special circumstance, wh-leading display questions can also be used to control students’ behavior as well. 1. Wh- leading display questions This type of question has the second highest frequency of use among all. There has been found 30 examples and all questions of this type were used to encourage students’ participation. Unlike to what have been said by experts and famous authors before, data found in this study reveals that display questions can have very good outcome in promoting students to get involved in discussion. Among those 30 questions raised by teachers, 6 of them got responses of 6-12 words and 6 of them got answers for more than 13 words. (See the table below.)
Examples include: “What is a psychologist?” and “What is different between affect and effect” (From Class 1); “Is that an amazing fact, a problem or an anecdote?” (From Class 2); “Why do you think he use the direct quotation?” (From Class 3); and “What does ‘strike’ mean?”(In Class 4) For questions listed above, clearly, the teacher has already known the answer. However, students are still willing to answer those questions. Especially in Class 4, it is amazing that 6 questions of this type received answers with more than 13 words. Looking through all the 6 display questions, it is found out that the majority of them were aimed at certain student. Instead of raising questions to the whole class, the teacher matched each question to one student. The result is that, student are driven to answer the question. Furthermore, this strategy worked quite well and in fact, accelerating the tempo of teaching. Moreover, there is one example found in this study which proves that wh- display questions can also be used to control student’s behavior: In Class 4, a very talkative
female student kept on chatting with her mate in Chinese; the teacher notices that and then asked “Cathy, are you teaching Chinese today?” . Immediately, the girl realized that she was doing something inappropriate and stopped. Compared to direct saying “Cathy, stop talking in Chinese”, this display question seems very tactful. However, teacher should be very careful about using this kind of question to maintain discipline. Whether the student would regard it as a satire or a joke just depends on the relationship between the student and the teacher. To summarize, at least in those 4 EFL classes which have been observed, display questions are not overused. Besides, display questions would have very positive outcomes in getting students to participate, especially when the question is addressed to one particular student. Moreover, display questions also have other possible functions e.g. behavior control. What is more, display questions could be more efficient in teaching some language point: If the student does not the answer, then the correct answer given by the teacher can be remembered distinctly by students.
4.2 Relationship between display and communicative question
As it is shown by data found in this study, display questions have could also be valuable in practice. The first advantage of display question is direct and specific. In other words, display question are very efficient in teaching some language points. Before teaching the point, the teacher could ask students first and then decide what
to add or teach. In an EFL class, by no means could the teacher teach students everything by only asking communicative question. The second advantage of display question is that students’ responses are much more predictable for teachers. That is to say, students’ answers are limited to some extent. Based on responses given by students, the teacher could decide what to do more accurately and quickly. This will save class time and makes the questioning more helpful in teaching. For communicative ones, admittedly, they are multi-functional. However, they still have disadvantages. The most obvious disadvantage is that students are not always prepared to answer. Especially when the question is too broad, e.g. asking whether they agree or not. It is hard for student to find the point of penetration. Students need to follow the teacher’s idea, to catch the gap, to structure their thinking in a very short time. In fact, the responses to those questions are much less limited. For students, to some extent, communicative questions are more cognitively demanding compared to display ones. For teachers, those questions are more challenging since they can hardly predict the answers. Although previous researches have strongly supported the rational of increasing the use of communicative questions, this research reveals that display questions are also important in forming a successful EFL lesson. Besides, it is also opposite to previous researches that EFL teachers are actually using more communicative questions in their classes. The pity is that, a considerable amount of those questions are not aimed at communication very much. Instead, some of them are used as a polite tool of managing the class, e.g. giving instructions or getting feedback. However, it needs
to be understood that communicative questions are more demanding for students. That could explain why teachers are more prudent in using those question in class. To sum them up, people should not assert that communicative questions are more worth using than display ones or vice visa. Under different situation, and depending on the audience, display questions could be more effective than communicative ones. The value of display questions is undeniable in real classroom teaching. Also, the outcomes of asking display or communicative questions are not as disparate as people predicted.
5. Conclusion 总结
Generally speaking, this study has three important conclusions: firstly, EFL teachers are using more communicative questions than display questions; secondly, the value of display questions are proved significant; thirdly, teachers are very aware of the meaning of establishing good relationship with students since polite strategies are more commonly used when teacher raising questions. In fact, biased opinion made on display or communicative questions should be modified. Moreover, questions’ functions could be more varied than their form can indicate. The best way is to matching the practical situation with the teacher’s purpose at the moment of questioning. Questions are just tools and the effect that the tool can bring is depending on teacher’s decision.
6. Reference 文献
Aschner, M. J. (1961). Asking questions to trigger thinking. NEA Journal, 50, 44-46. August, D., & Hakuta, K. (Eds) (1997). Improving schooling for language minority children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Bloom, B. S. (edit) (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook 1: Cognitive domain. New York: Longman, Green. Cullen, R. (1998). Teacher talk and the classroom context. ELT Journal, 52(3), 187-189. Gall, Meredith. D. (1970). The Use of Questions in Teaching. Review of educational research, 40, 707-720 Graesser, A., & Person, N. K. (1994). Question asking during tutoring. American Educational Research Journal, 31, 104-137. Kim Youb (2010). Scaffolding Through Questions in Upper Elementary ELL Learning Literacy Teaching and Learning, 15, 109–137 Majid Fraahian & Mehrdad Rezaee (2012). A case study of an EFL teacher’s type of questions: an inverstigation into classroom interaction. Percedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 47, 161-167 Nunan, D., & Lamb, C. (1996). The self-directed teacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nunan, D., & Lamb, C. (1996). The self-directed teacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Patrícia Albergaria Almeida (2012). Can I ask a question? The importance of classroom questioning. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 31, 634 – 638. Sun zuosheng (2012). An EmpiHcal Study on New Teacher-student Relationship and Questioning Strategies in ESL Classroom. English Language Teaching, 5, 175-183 Thompson Geoff (1997). Training teachers to ask questions. ELT Journal, 51, 99-105 Wilayat Bibi Khan and Hafiz Muhammad Inamullah (2011). A Study of Lower-order and Higher-order Questions at Secondary Level. Asian Social Science, 7, 149-157
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